The Mature Imagination Simon Biggs

The Mature Imagination
Dynamics of identity in midlife and beyond
Simon Biggs
Copyright © Simon Biggs 1999
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Created in the United States of America

To Doreen, Clare, Eve and Guy
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Maturity and its discontents
2 From ego psychology to the active imagination
3 Postmodern ageing
4 Masque and ageing
5 Midlifestyle
6 Meaning and forgetting
7 Social spaces and mature identity
8 Policy spaces in health and welfare
9 Conclusions and implications
References
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Chris Phillipson and Mike
Hepworth for their comments on this manuscript and
related material, Michael Allen for ideas and conversation,

and Clair Chinnery for her help in preparing graphic
material. Thanks also go to Clare Allen and Guy and Eve
Biggs for their support and forbearance.
www.freepsychotherapybooks.org 6
Introduction
WHAT IS THE MATURE IMAGINATION?
To encounter the mature imagination raises issues
that are key to both personal and social understanding.
How far, for example, is it possible to discover an

authentic subjectivity for adulthood? What are the
influences that shape our understandings of age and
identity? What are the possibilities for change, and how
desirable is it perceived to be? In the attempt to answer

these and related questions, the reader is invited to take a
journey through some of the guiding ideas and
assumptions of our times. Contemporary Western

societies have developed notions and methods that mould
both our conception of the human condition and our

perception of the options and alternatives available to us.
Chief among them are the psychotherapies and the
adoption of lifestyles which are intended to determine the

direction of the adult lifecourse. They not only provide,
with varying degrees of success, techniques for the
modification of body and identity, they also create
narratives for the experience of self that allow us to
recognize it in certain forms and not others.
But what is meant by mature imagination? The
phrase has been adopted in part because there is

currently an absence of ways of describing human
development in maturity that are positive and offer the
prospect of critical analysis. It constitutes a way of

approaching the years in which people consider
themselves to have reached a level of sustained
experience and a certain competence in negotiating

adulthood. It includes life-phases that have been
described as ranging through midlife and then on into

later life and old age. As such, it contains most of the adult
lifecourse under contemporary conditions. When one is

on its threshold, mature age appears disconcertingly
without maps to guide us. The confusion experienced

with the approach of maturity has been recognized from
the most distant awakenings of the modern period:
Midway upon the journey of our life,
I found myself within a dark forest,
Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.
When Dante wrote this first stanza of the Divine
Comedy, in 1307, he was 35, the middle-point of the
biblical lifecourse, which, it was assumed, spanned three

score years and ten. He was, in other words, in midlife,
and may have been suffering something of a crisis. The
signposts that had allowed him to negotiate the first half

of his life had become lost and obscure. There was, on the
basis of previous experience, no way out of the wood,
except of course, downward. It seemed from the

perspective of midlife that one now had to abandon all
hope.
Questions about the development of a mature identity
—that is to say, an identity that will be serviceable and

take the bearer through to deep old age—are of particular
contemporary importance. This is not simply because
Western societies are in the grip of continued
demographic change, but also because a consideration of
mature ageing now has a special practical and theoretical

value. New ideas are needed to shape the way in which
policy-makers, professional helpers and the person in the
street think about their own mature years and those of
others. A deeper understanding of adult ageing, so long
eclipsed by a cultural preoccupation with novelty,

childhood and youth culture, can inform our
understanding of the contemporary world. Our everyday
as well as our formal theories of life, which we often take

as givens and rarely subject to critical review, are
challenged by ageing. Ageing forces the perception of
different paths out of the forest.
A paradox emerges when the words mature and
imagination are brought together, which goes to the heart
of the issue of identity in adulthood proper. Maturity is

couched in the language of completion. One is, at this part
of the life phase and according to the Oxford English

Dictionary (1973), 'fully developed in body and mind',
'complete, perfect or ready'. Dictionaries are good guides

to the assumptions of dominant cultures. Here we
discover age dressed in the language of completion and
fullness. However, flipping backwards to imagination
raises a series of different issues. Imagination invites the

'forming of mental concepts of what is not present to the
senses ... beyond those derived from external objects'. It is
a imbued with a sense of becoming, of travelling beyond
the immediate and the concrete. One imagines other

worlds. However, here lies a cultural problem: the
questions of mature adulthood are from that part of the
lifecourse that many would wish to ignore, to put back on

the shelf. They ask about attempts that can be made to
make sense of this contradiction between the
apprehension of completion and the promise of further

and deeper personal development. The issues that ageing
raises for culture and an understanding of culture are,

more often than not, couched in negative terms as a thing
to be avoided, denied or rejected. Identity is a close
relation to these concerns. It describes the way in which
people present an acceptable face to their social worlds,
something that is constructed and maintained, is an act of

self-invention which also depends upon social context. It
is, then, very much a concept at the crossroads of the
personal and the social. It includes within itself props and

associations that already exist in the social world, plus
ideas, fantasies and desires that arise from an individual's

inner being. Some theorists have approached the problem
of identity in maturity through the perspective of decline,
others through an appreciation of lifestyles that maintain
values and assumptions from other parts of the
lifecourse; others still have asked about the existential

dilemmas that require resolution for a more complete
notion of self to emerge. In our journey out of the wood,
we are not, then, starting from scratch. Some paths have

already been traced through the undergrowth, which,
with various degrees of success, suggest where the
lifecourse may be heading and in some cases challenge

the proposition of thinking in terms of lifecourse at all.
In order to clarify some of these pathways, the
chapters in this book have been organized into a series of
couplets. First, mature imagination is approached through

an examination of the influence of psychoanalysis. As this
tradition has developed, increasingly specific and often
opposing conceptions of the lifecourse have taken shape.

Most notable among these have been the growth of ego
psychology in the United States and analytic psychology
in Europe, whose influence is felt in a wide diaspora of
therapies, models and approaches to ageing. Both are
marked by alternative responses to an emerging tension
between social conformity and self-expression. Second,
consideration is given to postmodern conceptions of

contemporary adulthood. Ageing presents a significant
challenge to postmodern perspectives on identity, insofar
as it suggests a barrier to the possibilities of continual

cultural consumption and personal reinvention. The
mature imagination, it is suggested, is required to engage
in the performance of masquerade, in order to negotiate a

series of uncertain options for contemporary identity.
While postmodern theorizing appears to eschew

metaphors of depth and surface in human experience,
these have to be reconsidered in order to make sense of
the contradictory circumstances of the ageing identity.
Third, special attention is given to the idea of midlifestyle
as a solution to some of the problems raised by these

different philosophical traditions. Midlifestyles consist of
the maintenance of the priorities of mid-adulthood and
have been closely associated with ideas that identities can

be consumed and invented, depending on immediate
circumstances. It is suggested that these lifestyle

solutions to the problem of ageing effectively address the
surfaces of mature identity but do not question what
occurs beyond this social mask. Deeper layers of
development therefore need to be engaged with. Fourth,
and finally, two chapters are used to explore the

relationship between social and personal meaning
through the metaphor of social space. Certain spaces may
allow the inner and outer logics of mature identity to flow

together, while others inhibit this process. The impact of
contemporary trends in social policy is considered in case
examples of the interaction between socially engineered

spaces and the possibilities and desires that the mature
imagination might come to contain.
THE ARGUMENT
From psychoanalysis to the active imagination
Our journey to discover an authentic subjectivity for
mature adulthood begins with a consideration of the
legacy left by the classical psychoanalysis of Sigmund

Freud (1905). Psychoanalysis has not only influenced the
possibility of therapeutic intervention in maturity, but
become something of a cultural icon, infiltrating our
everyday common-sense understandings of the human
condition. It contains many of the characteristics that
have since been associated with modernism, which in this
context include an attempt to master the past and a belief

in personal progress. Two trends have particularly
influenced its perspective on the mature imagination.
First and foremost is a focus on childhood as a factor

determining the shape of adult identity. Second is a
preoccupation with the relationship between hidden
parts of the self and the surface meanings attributed to

events. From an inauspicious start, in which it was
suggested that the sheer volume of material accumulated

across the lifecourse and an absence of motivation
precluded therapy with mature adults, a succession of
revisions threw new light on the ageing psyche. Most
importantly, chronological age was unpeeled from an
internal experience of how old one felt.
Responses to the Freudian legacy can be seen in the

work of Erik Erikson and Carl Gustav Jung, both of whom
attempted to understand development across the
lifecourse as a whole. Erikson (1959) explored the

relationship between social expectation and the key tasks
for mature identity, and in so doing asserted the
centrality of whichever stage an individual was currently
in. However, it is argued that in his attempt to link adult

identity to generativity, we are little closer to
understanding the unique features of a mature
imagination. Indeed, it becomes a series of 'Chinese

boxes' whereby whatever stage one looks in for authentic
self-expression, the answer lies elsewhere. Jung (1931),
on the other hand, saw social conformity and a focus on

childhood experience as factors inhibiting personal
development. His split with Freud resulted in an entirely

different series of priorities being suggested for what he
called 'the second half of life'. Central to these ideas was
the development of an 'active imagination', which was
seen as part and parcel of the adult task of individuation.
Mature adults, it is argued, respond to feelings of getting

stuck in midlife by discovering previously suppressed
potential and engaging in an active dialogue with material
from the unconscious. Mature adulthood is thus seen as a

time for a natural expansion of the self, in contrast to the
constraining presence of social expectation. The enduring

view that emerges is of an expanded mature self existing
within a hostile social environment.
Choosing not to grow old
Notions of ageing have been radically affected by

postmodern conceptions of identity. A heady combination
of consumer culture and a need to be constantly recycling
a sense of who one is suggests that it may be possible to
choose not to grow old. Indeed, personal continuity and a

sense of embeddedness in the lifecourse may have
become outmoded concepts in what appears to be a
continuous enticement from the possibilities presented

by contemporary Western societies. Consumer lifestyles
have even challenged the restricting presence of the

ageing body, now offered reinvigoration at a price,
through the use of pharmacology such as Viagra and

hormone replacement therapies, a cyborgic merging of
bodies and machines and the prospect of genetic
engineering. Psychodynamic thinking has itself
responded to these changing circumstances by
encouraging the peeling of different meanings away from

one another. Dependency and old age, chronological age
and the personal experience of ageing, social expectation
and lifecourse development have all been loosened up in
such a way that meanings previously assumed to be
coterminous and inseparable may now be distinguished

one from another. These trends have been noticeable in a
renewed emphasis on the importance of relationships, a
focus on the here-and-now and the possibility of multiple

identities being contained within the personal psyche.
However, it is argued that these trends have privileged
surface meanings of identity at the expense of a sense of

depth to the personality and the value of history.
Enthusiasts of postmodernity suggest that the
increasing uncertainties and rapid changes that are

endemic to contemporary social existence should be seen
as an opportunity rather than a threat. Baudrillard (1990)
has, for example, suggested a world of floating signifiers
in which identities can be put together and consumed

without reference to the original meanings that different
props and attributes might have had. These and other
ideas have been employed by writers such as
Featherstone and Hepworth (1989, 1995) to examine the

possibilities for postmodern ageing. Ageing is considered
as a series of progressive betrayals that let an individual
down and come between the self and the multiple
identities made available through consumerism. We are

really, according to this view, all youthful inside, but have
become trapped in ageing bodies. The blurring of identity,
plus the possibility of prosthetic enhancement and

pharmaceutic manipulation of the body, hold out,
however, the promise of an indefinite postponement and
possible escape from the consequences of ageing.
Ageing also suggests a point at which the postmodern
desire to live in a continuous present and see the world as
a series of infinitely malleable surfaces hits the buffers of

fixity and finitude. There are, in other words, important
questions about the human condition that cannot be
bucked and which an apprehension of maturity brings
into sharper focus.
Maturity and masque
Two starkly different views of the mature imagination
are beginning to emerge. First, there is a need to protect
development from midlife onwards from a series of
negative associations and uncertainties if an inner sense
of personal value and integrity is to be preserved.
However, there is, second, an awareness of the possibility
of creating surfaces for identity, through consumerism

and a reversibility of choices that might free mature
experience from the coercive hold of traditional
stereotypes. It is suggested in Chapter 4 that, in order to

understand the development of identity in maturity, both
of these processes need to be taken into account. In other
words, maturity approximates a masquerade in which

certain parts of the self are expressed through the
adoption of a persona, a socially acceptable mask, while
others are hidden beneath it. This layering of the mature

imagination allows identity to be displayed through a
cohesive, and thus believable, surface performance which,
so to speak, 'gets you through the day'. It exists in
episodes and can be modified as circumstances dictate.

Indeed, it might be thought of as a signature of maturity
that surface identities become malleable and can be used
as needed, rather than being too firmly fixed in place or

determined by social conformity. The surface
performance therefore largely conforms to an external

logic, in the sense that it forms a bridge between inner
desire and social connection. Beneath this surface of
persona and masquerade lies an inner logic that is
thereby protected from external attack. The internal logic
of maturity would contain a sense of continuity of the self

and a relatedness to history that has otherwise been
eclipsed. It is here that possibilities and potential that
cannot find a place in such an indeterminate world exist

and flourish. The mature imagination is therefore
conceived of as multilayered. It has the potential of
breadth in its surfaces, yet depth in the different layers of

psychological expression that it contains.
Midlifestyles
Midlife has become a crossroads for many of these
conflicting ideas about the lifecourse. Historically it has

been seen successively as a crisis, as a transition and as a
lifestyle in and of itself. It is a period of life which is rich in
paradox as the increasing certainties of the body's
fallibility are apprehended and it is realized that there is
no infinite amount of time available to pursue all of one's

desires in life. However, it is also a time of increased
uncertainty as one becomes simultaneously aware of the
precarious nature of existence. Midlife therefore becomes
a search for solutions to the puzzling notion of finitude. In
the middle of the twentieth century middle adulthood

came to be associated with metaphors of crisis
(Neugarten 1968). Paradoxically, in order to continue to
conform to society's demands, the middle aged were

expected to relinquish the goals and identities that had
served them well in achieving an acceptable social
position. Rebellion was an expected phase that mature

adults went through on the road to disengagement and a
handing over to the next generation. It was, as has been

argued by contemporary social theorists, functional for
society; but not functional for the individual at that age.
In the search for an explanation of midlife
discontinuity, other periods of transition in the lifecourse
were also examined and analogies drawn that helped to

explain the midlife experience. Midlife was seen as a
recapitulation of adolescent crises of identity (King 1980).
But now the mask had become too fixed, and needed to
rediscover its flexibility. A heady mixture of changing

social expectations, psychological priorities and
narcissism.
Midlifestyle can be seen as the latest in this line of
metaphors, through a recourse to the salving balm of

postmodern reinvention of the self. There are now a
multiplicity of cultural images of age that can be

employed in the manufacture and consumption of mature
identities. Narrative therapies (McAdams 1993) are well
suited to this role and have been used specifically to
create new lamps out of the old identities that individuals

have collected to date. They are the technologies of self
invention in midlife.
A challenging and seductive solution to the

ambivalences of midlife can be found in the growth of
midlife manuals. These popular writings contain recipes
for the maintenance of midlifestyles into an indefinite

personal future, a means of positively construing the
different phases that mature adulthood supplies and even

ways of escaping the ageing process altogether. Rather
than harking back to the storms and anxieties of

adolescence, this search for a golden age of the youthful
self lies in the carefree days of pre-adolescent latency.
Narratives are supplied by which one can live through
maturity without becoming old. However, it is argued that
such narratives have become disconnected from wider

issues of authenticity in terms of the lifecourse and of
sociability. They are therefore very much a surface
phenomenon which leaves many of the difficult questions,

that arise through the emergence of a mature
imagination, unaddressed.
The mature imagination, it is argued, has to take two

processes of identity formation into account. First, a
convincing narrative has to be constructed in the here
and now, and it is here that it connects with the discourse

on surfaces and postmodernity. However, it also has to
connect with those increasingly pressing questions that

arise with continued ageing, which may not be able to be
overtly expressed. Something must exist behind and

beyond the masquerade of midlifestyle. If midlifestyle is
left to its own devices it increasingly inhabits a world of
its own creation, with its own logic that abjures
connection with deeper issues of lifecourse development.

If the presentation of self is not grounded in these other
issues it can almost become psychotic in its reliance on a
cut off yet internally consistent world view. Candidates
for what is hidden behind midlifestyle appearances are

varied and, depending upon circumstances, might include
the following. First, a sense of personal continuity
through the valuing of memory and the recognition that

the remembered past has a life and value of its own,
independent of attempts to reconstruct it in the service of
current narratives. Second, an apprehension of existential

questions arising from the finite nature of life and an
associated interest in spirituality. These questions invite

the consideration of meanings that transcend the
individual, of connection to something greater than the
self. This desire for connection also extends to a third
area that includes forms of sociability, sexuality,
generativity and social action.
The mature imagination is increasingly seen to

consist of a complex interplay between depth and surface,
from which a variety of possibilities for self-expression
and personal identity can emerge. It is suggested that a

coming together of depth and surface, of continuity and
cohesion, also draws attention to the relationship
between reflection and reflexivity. Reflection suggests a
reconnection with longitudinal components of identity,

the past and future possibility. It rescues an opportunity
to stand back and see patterns in events over time.
Reflexivity allows a critical apprehension of the present.

Imprecision has led to a conflation of these two important
processes. Both are needed to achieve a mature
awareness of self.
Utopias and dystopias
The argument so far would suggest a changing
balance between hidden and surface elements of a mature
imagination. For what, in other words, can a voice be

found and under what circumstances?
The possibility of genuine self-expression arises when
external circumstances and the internal logic of the

psyche overlap sufficiently to let deeper layers of
personal concern show through. In order to explore this
relationship further, the qualities of social space have
been explored in more detail. When certain social spaces
emerge that are facilitative to self-expression, reliance on
masquerade may be reduced. However, when the
expression of personal identity jars with external, and in
this case age-structured, social meanings, it becomes

increasingly layered into tacit and explicit components. If
the social space is hostile to the development of age-
related personal expression, it is possible that what the

external, observing other sees bears little resemblance to
internal logic and desire. The degree to which masking
will reduce and internal logic and desire will become

explicit therefore has considerable implications for
communication with helping professionals, the
assessment of service quality and forms of participation.
Following insights from the study of psychodynamic
systems in organizational culture, it appears that a key

component of facilitative social space is an ability to
contain reflection. By this is meant the degree to which

particular groups, agencies and policies allow protected
spaces to emerge. These protective and facilitative spaces
act as a psychological container for thoughts and feelings
that would otherwise not find a voice in that

environment. A social space does not necessarily have to
correspond with a particular physical setting or
organizational structure, however, and can be extended
to include the sorts of meanings that exist around

concepts such as midlife, ageing, old age, health and
welfare. The point is that the shape a space takes is a
dynamic pattern of influences that can either restrict or

enhance mature imagination.
Health and social care systems have been key
influences on how ageing is shaped within contemporary

Western societies. Midlifestyles have come to dominate
identities for those with the psychological, social and
economic resources to engage significantly with age-

related consumer cultures. Recourse to health and social
care remains a determining factor in shaping notions of
vulnerability and control that not only affect those people
in need, but spread out to influence the understanding

and positioning of later life in wider society and in the
public mind. However, this anchoring point for an ageing
identity has been eroded by turn of the millennium social
policy in Europe, Australasia and North America. In these

countries, concern has been raised about the emergence
of 'no care zones' (Estes et at. 1993), such that older
adults cease to have services provided to them, where the
safety net has been withdrawn altogether. In some cases

it may be that adult ageing provokes entry into 'no
identity zones' (Phillipson and Biggs 1998). These would
be social spaces that no longer contain possibilities for

the expression of not simply the active imagination and
existential questions related to adult ageing, but the
possibility of any voice for the requirements of age.

Within a century, social policy has moved from a position
in which ageing has been overdetermined by notions of

dependency and disengagement, to a situation in which
few if any containing spaces protect mature identity from
the vertiginal uncertainties and foreclosing imperatives of
contemporary life.
Policy spaces
This is not to say that certain social spaces have failed

to emerge as a result of successive policy fashions. Each in
its turn, the postwar consensus on state welfare,
marketization and, latterly, a social democratic focus on
social inclusion and communitarianism, can be
interpreted as an attempt to increase the possibilities for
personal and social expression. Each includes a different
balance between positive containment, as expressed in

the possibility for protected, reflective identity and the
construction of negative, restrictive spaces in which
mature identity must be suppressed. Each has constituted

an attempt to shape the nature of citizenship and the
place of mature identity within it. It is suggested that two
social spaces are opening up in the public mind as we

enter a new millennium, both of which are concerned
with creating a paradoxical sense of togetherness

between workers and those who use human services. The
spaces created are often, however, highly ambivalent.
The first of these capitalizes on that sense of
uncertainty and flexibility surrounding established social
roles, both informal and professional. Trends towards

partnership between professional groupings and between
those who receive, provide and purchase services blur
traditional role boundaries and allow the possibility of
recombination. Interprofessional collaboration and user

participation, as these trends have been labelled,
emphasize the achievement of partnership as a means of
combatting social exclusion. It is unclear, however, how
far they can include forms of vulnerability which do not fit

the partnership model.
The second space presents a disconcerting

preoccupation with control and surveillance as a solution
to questions of mental capacity, vulnerability and abuse.
The abuse of vulnerable adults appears to be a
phenomenon that has only recently been formally

recognized, and has been recognized under specific policy
conditions. While creating a space in which abuse can be
discussed and ending an era of silence, swallowed hurt

and injustice, it has also, together with a debate on mental
incapacity, emerged as a space in which those who do not
fit into conceptions of capacity and partnership can be
contained.
A continuing theme in both developments is the

shaping of mature identity as becoming 'one-of-us', which
in this context includes new interpretations of becoming

like, of adopting professional mentalities, while at the
same time evacuating threats to or dissent from what at
first inspection appear as emancipatory spaces.
This discussion of the possibilities for mature

imagination raises a number of issues for the social
psychology of ageing and the uses of psychotherapy,
lifestyle and medical technology. It suggests new
directions for research and service development. Most

importantly, it breathes life into the human condition in
midlife and beyond.
1
Maturity and its discontents
THE POWER OF PSYCHOANALYSIS
It would be foolish to begin a book on mature identity
without considering the powerful role played by
psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic thinking has not only held

a key position in shaping how identity is conceived, but
also helped to form contemporary notions of what it is to

be an adult and the role of ageing in the scheme of things.
It has influenced and in its turn been influenced by views
of the self and identity from the beginning of the

twentieth century through to the present, and exemplifies
many of the changes that have come about in how we
think, feel and act concerning the mature imagination.
As a leading theoretical position of the modern world,

psychoanalytic ideas have entered everyday life and
become part of the way we think and interpret our

experience of the social world. This influence has been
particularly strong among the helping professions in
health and social care. Here, the medium in which work

takes place concerns people and their problems, and the
means of achieving change depends to a large extent on
attitudes, values and personal skills. A theoretical position

that prioritizes the hidden influences on motivations of
workers no less than patients, clients and other users of
services, plus the relationship between mind, body and

society, is of considerable import to the core concerns of
this area. The cultural embeddedness of psychodynamic
thinking means that it often forms a tacit conceptual

backdrop, lending shape to rules of thumb used by
practitioners to make sense of issues in their day-to-day

work. The impact of the psychodynamic tradition can be
felt in at least three ways: as a therapeutic tool, as a
source of personal narrative and as a cultural
phenomenon in its own right.
First, then, psychoanalysis and other psychodynamic
approaches can be understood as a therapeutic

endeavour aimed at achieving specific curative results.
Here, the psychodynamic approach refers to a particular
method of achieving change in troubled individuals, of
which psychoanalysis, the method developed by Sigmund
Freud and his followers, was the first and most influential.
These methods have been referred to as the 'talking
therapies', as it is through discussion rather than through
medical or drug therapy that change is achieved. They

have also been called 'depth therapies', as they rely on the
uncovering of meanings which are considered to underlie
everyday thought, emotion and action. As such, they could

be thought of, to use a Foucauldian (1977) term, as
'technologies of the self', a means by which personal

identity can be altered in one direction or another
through the application of certain techniques applied by
suitably trained initiates. However, once a method has
become established, there is a tendency for practitioners
to apply that technology, uncritically, to different persons

or groups of people (Rustin 1991), with perhaps too
much concern as to whether these persons and groups fit
the method, rather than it being adapted to new

conditions. Work with mature adults, for example, could
then be seen as an extension of the method to another

area, often marginal to the main concerns of the
discipline, a sort of conceptual imperialism whereby
increasingly exotic and macabre aspects of the human
condition come within its sway. It is questionable
whether sufficient attention is given, under such

conditions, to the diverse responses and specific needs of
mature and older adults. This is not to deny that
practitioners genuinely wish to help older adults and are

courageous in their attempts to do so. Such an interest
has given rise to questions about the effectiveness of
certain approaches with older people and the special

phenomena that this work uncovers (see, for example,
Knight 1986; O'Leary 1996; Terry 1997). These and
similar considerations will be addressed by the current

investigation, insofar as they bear on the subjectivity of
mature adulthood and the shaping of midlife and old age
that results.
Second, a psychodynamic understanding of the world

supplies a narrative that can be used for the construction
of a personal story or identity. Even if one is not engaged
in psychotherapy as a method, the tradition and the
whole way of thinking that comes with it can influence
the way the lifecourse is interpreted. Psychoanalysis
provides a framework within which personal events can
be made sense of as part of a broader story. The tradition

of explaining daily life in terms of psychoanalyic theory is
a long one, as exemplified by Freud's (1901) work The
Psychopathology of Everyday Life, which attempted to

display the hidden meanings of common behaviours, and
in the process introduced an unsuspecting world to the
'Freudian slip'. Succeeding descriptions of human

development, such as Erikson's (1959) eight psycho-
social stages of the life cycle, prioritize certain

experiences and interpret events within a particular
framework. Some aspects of the lifecourse are thereby
seen as more important than others, and are differently
situated in terms of conceptual importance. If, for
example, a young person experiences anxiety over how to

dress for a friend's party, to present oneself to a social
audience, an Eriksonian framework might locate that
experience as part of a preparation of an adult social role,

while a more traditional psychoanalytic interpretation
would focus on a displaced expression of unresolved

sexual attraction within the family. How an event is
evaluated and what is done about it depends on how it is
seen as fitting into such a wider narrative. These theories
provide potential frameworks for the whole lifecourse
and the shape and value attributed to different phases.

Midlife, for example, may be presented as a new
beginning or as an adjustment to decline. Each will
influence the stories people tell themselves about their

own and others' life experience.
Third, psychoanalysis exists as a cultural
phenomenon independently of its use as a method of

change or personal understanding. When Freud (1930)
wrote Civilization and Its Discontents he imagined that he
was applying the psychoanalytic method in order to
explain social phenomena, as a showcase for the

theoretical power of psychoanalysis. Civilization, as he
referred to Western societies of the time, became an
object of study, another case example. However,

psychoanalysis also influences the culture that it is a part
of as a cultural phenomenon in its own right. Over time it
transforms its own objects of study and is, at the same
time, transformed by them. People begin to use and
identify with ideas originating from psychoanalysis
because they have simply become part of the language of
individualistic Westernized cultures. The assumptions

held within psychodynamic thinking become part of the
common-sense world maintained by those cultures. This
taken-for-granted ragbag of tacit assumptions binds a

cultural world view together. In other words, we don't
have to think about them any more as they become part
of the assumed foundations on which everyday decisions

can be based. With the domestication of these once
radical ideas, observations that were shocking and

transformative become commonplace and lose the power
to disturb. It is not even necessary to know where these
assumptions originated any more, they are just there.
Such assumptive realities are fine when we use them as
fleeting explanations for why we might keep mislaying

the keys to our parent's house, but become more
problematic when they provide the tacit framework
guiding our cultural attitudes towards intergenerational

relationships and their value. At this point tacit cultural
assumptions influence both the subjectivity of later life

and the positioning of those phases of the lifecourse.
PSYCHODYNAMIC APPROACHES AS PART OF MODERNISM
Psychodynamic approaches to the human subject can
also be seen as part of a wider trend in Western social
thought. They share properties that place them within the

'modern' tradition, arising from the Enlightenment, which
includes a belief in progress, the power of rationality and
the positive value of individual autonomy. A focus on

change and critical stance towards that which has gone
before is typical of modernist theories (Frosh 1991). For
modernism, the present is temporary, a way station

between the restrictions of the past and a utopian future,
and a means of snapping the chains linking the present to

the past.
In terms of progress, psychoanalysis conceives of

human development as an unshackling of the personality
from the constraints of a personal history. This process
involves the strengthening of the rational ego by
extending its power over the chaotic contents of the
unconscious. This is said to occur through an archaeology

of the mind whereby hidden memories are rediscovered
and made available to consciousness. The psychoanalytic
method provides a scientific analysis of problems that can
lead not only to the uncovering of reality behind
appearance, but to an improved lot for individuals now

freed in the present. It is, in this sense, a critical eye that
banishes past superstitions, shows us the way that the
world works and how we can overcome constraint. This

approach to personal development shares many
characteristics with the social and historical rise of the
bourgeois class in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century

Europe and the United States—an overthrow of
traditional religious and aristocratic power through a
privileging of the virtues of work, science and active

individualism (Kumar 1995). At bottom, people are
responsible for their own well-being and, in lifecourse
terms, prudence in a productive adulthood lays the
foundations for a satisfying old age. However,

psychoanalysis also has an ambivalent relationship to
bourgeois social aspiration. The great paradox of
psychoanalysis was that in order to increase the

circumference of rationality, the domain of the conscious
ego, it highlighted the simultaneous presence of the

irrational unconscious and the power of sexuality. It was,
as Zaretsky (1997) has pointed out, a radical force in the
early years of the twentieth century which subverted
many of the assumptions held about everyday reality.
Psychoanalysis is particularly important as a personal

narrative and cultural signifier of ageing because it is first
and foremost a developmental theory. It includes certain

assertions about the lifecourse, the possibilities it holds,
its scope and direction. It identifies areas that are
formative and how those formations then influence
subsequent relationships and possibilities. It maintains a

view on the past, the present and the future, with the past
as key to a psychoanalytic understanding of the
lifecourse. Much of the behaviour and identity occurring
in adulthood, it is assumed, can be explained through an

examination of childhood experience. Further, because of
the therapeutic orientation of the approach, the past is
also generally seen as being problematic. Relationships

that take place in the individual's past, particularly
between generations, are given priority of place when
explaining difficulties in the present. Thus, while the past
is afforded considerable importance, it is also construed
negatively. The story that psychoanalysis tells us about
human development describes certain persons, or objects
of attention, as heroes and others as villains. Significant

adults from one's childhood are likely to be positioned as
determining the difficulties one has in weathering the
contemporary challenges of adult life. As these significant

adults, or others who signify them by dint of a shared
cohort experience or chronological age, also coexist in the
here-and-now, this view implies an attitude towards

older adults in general. Whether these older adults are
conceived of as receiving the projected associations of

parental figures, or come to signify the past itself, there is
an associated danger that they become negatively
positioned within the world view that the theory
represents. Further, because childhood is seen as being
formative, it is paid much more attention in theoretical

terms than other parts of the lifecourse. Psychodynamic
thinking tends, then, to be highly developed in its
understanding of the early lifecourse and underdeveloped

in its consideration of later phases.
A second core distinction that emerges from the
approach concerns the relationship between hidden and
surface meanings attributed to personal and social
phenomena. Modernism, with its critical interest in 'deep

structures' that determine or situate existing surfaces of
culture, conceives immediately observed events as a
reflection of an underlying reality. To understand and

achieve control over the lifecourse, it is necessary to
make these tacit substrates explicit. For psychoanalysis, it
means that what you see is not what you get. A

multiplicity of inner meanings can adhere to any one
event and, while these might not be immediately available

to consciousness, a method is supplied to uncover them.
The distinction between hidden and surface meanings
also allows chronological age to be peeled off from
psychological age. Thus, while one might be classified for
external purposes as 24, 48 or 83, the internal experience

of self could be at any of these ages at any one point in
time. The experience of disjuncture between internal and
external attributions of age has been noted by a number

of writers (de Beauvoir 1970; Featherstone and
Hepworth 1989; Thompson 1992) and is a key

contribution to the study of mature identity.
Psychoanalysis supplies a conceptual apparatus for
examining the meanings that such an experience might
hold. Adopting distinction between the hidden and the
surface also allows the possibility that an overt

presentation of identity might serve to protect other
aspects of the self which are not immediately observable.
The process of hiding may be unconscious or contain

degrees of conscious awareness. This perspective lends a
multilayered quality to human relationships that helps to
destabilize stereotypic assumptions about fixed

definitions of age and ageing.
The value attributed to past and childhood events,
when added to the relationship between hidden and
surface meaning, has lead to a particular view of the

mature imagination, which we will begin to explore
below.
AGEING: AN INAUSPICIOUS START
Freud's initial statements on the prospects for
development in mature adulthood are few, and are

dispersed among papers that are largely concerned with
other issues. Regardless of their peripheral status in
Freud's own thinking, these comments have had
considerable influence on the subsequent theory and
practice of psychoanalysis. Much has been made of an

address delivered to the Viennese medical profession in
1904, and published in 1905 as part of his essay On
Psychotherapy. It is here that he claims: 'psychotherapy is

not possible near or above the age of 50, the elasticity of
the mental processes, on which treatment depends, is as a
rule lacking—old people are not educable—and, on the

other hand, the mass of material to be dealt with would
prolong the duration of treatment indefinitely.' Freud
(1905: C.W. 1953, 7: 264).
Curiously, Freud was himself 48 when he gave his
address and thus fell within his own 'near or above' age-
range, a period, as Hildebrand (1982) notes, before he
entirely recast his own theory of mind, establishing the

concept of oedipal conflict and thus the intellectual
foundations of psychoanalysis itself. Similarly, many key
thinkers in the growth of psychoanalytic thought also
began their analyses in their mid to late forties. Melanie

Klein was 41 when she began a personal analysis with
Karl Abraham, and Wilfred Bion was 48 when he started
with Klein (Hinshelwood personal communication, 1998).
It has been suggested that the context in which Freud

gave his address might be crucial to his down-playing the
value of psychoanalysis in later life. His audience was,

according to Knight (1996), regarded as potentially
hostile, and as other commentators have noted (Billig
1997), this was a period in which Freud was particularly
concerned with social acceptance. Freud was beginning a

period of social and professional rehabilitation after the
publication of Studies on Hysteria with Breuer in 1895,
which had provoked a decade of intellectual isolation. In

that book, he outlined a possible psychosexual basis to
phenomena hitherto thought of as purely physical in
origin, and introduced the possibility of a 'talking'
therapy. It was thus crucial that the 1904 address was

purged of any further unorthodoxy from a speaker whose
reputation was closely associated with the propagation of
salacious views. The tenor of the paper is cautious,
outlining circumstances for the use of psychoanalytic

method that 'can scarcely be laid down as yet', and, as
part of that caution, Freud suggests conditions under
which his new therapy might be inappropriate.
He is playing safe, and rules out 'psychoses, states of

confusion and deeply rooted depression' and cases in
which the 'speedy removal of dangerous symptoms' is

required. Along with that list comes middle and later life.
Mature ageing is cited in only two other notable

instances from the entirety of Freud's work. One predates
the 1904 speech: Sexual Aetiology of Neuroses (1897) is

largely speculative, with little evidence that Freud had
practical experience with older patients to draw on. It is
suggested that psychoanalytic therapy might be

unsuitable for the young and the 'feeble minded', as well
as people who are 'very advanced in years'. Two main
reasons are cited for not using psychoanalysis with this

latter group. The first concerns what has come to be
known as the argument over accumulated material, and

refers to the amount of experience accrued over a
lifecourse which, it is argued, would take too long to

analyse. The second reason refers to a lack of value
attached to 'nervous health' in the later stages of
adulthood. Who attaches this lack of value to later life,
whether it is the analyst, society or the patients
themselves, is unclear from the text.
Further explanation of what might be meant by this
assertion can be found in a third reference to later life in
Freud's own work, occurring in Types of Onset of the

Neuroses (1912). In this text, neurotic breakdowns are
linked to puberty and the menopause, which themselves
are related to 'more or less sudden increases of libido'. It

is argued that libidinal energy, which is seen as providing
the motor of psychological change with its fuel, is
otherwise relatively absent in later life. This absence

leads to a pessimistic general prognosis for interventions
after the menopause in women, and presumably men at

that stage in life. According to this 'classical' Freudian
view, 'a combination of the defences of older patients

becoming rigid and a reduced drive for libidinal
gratification meant that there was unlikely to be sufficient
motivation for change in later life' (King 1974: 22). Freud
did not, however, make a link between the presence of

neurotic conflict that the comments on a menopausal
midlife imply, and usually considered the grounds par
excellence for the employment of psychoanalysis, and the
possibility of inducing therapeutic change. He did not, in

other words, subscribe to the view, expressed
subsequently by Abraham (1919), that it is the age at
which a problem appears, rather than the age of the

patient, that is of key significance.
It would appear, from the relative absence of source
material on later life that occurs in Freud's own writing,

that while he might discount the use of psychoanalysis at
that point in the lifecourse, these arguments are
essentially about technique and only secondly about adult

subjectivity. There may be less energy available for
psychic change, but there is little to suggest that the
mature psyche is not subject to the same processes and
mechanisms found in any other part of life. Indeed, an

absence of subsequent comment might simply imply the
universality of the concepts Freud believed he had
discovered.
However provisional and marginal these views

appear to be, they quickly gained credence within a
growing circle of analysts. This was so much the case that
in 1919 Abraham found it necessary to comment that
Freud's early opinion 'Is often taken to mean that

treatment in the fourth decade of life holds out doubtful
prospects of relief, and that in the fifth decade, and
particularly in the climacteric, the chances of achieving

favourable results are decidedly adverse. Beyond fifty it is
often denied that our therapy has any effect at all'
(Abraham 1919: 313). Abraham's summary of prevailing

opinion seems subject to some chronological slippage
itself, as unsuitability now clearly includes midlife. His
main point, however, was to defend the use of therapy

with older analysands, even though a patient might be
'less inclined to part with a neurosis which he has had
most of this life'. For, while longstanding habits might be
difficult to change, he summarized four examples of

therapeutic work on 'neuroses in persons of over forty
and even fifty years of age'. Prognosis, he concluded,
depended on age at onset, with earlier onset making the

chances of cure less likely. 'In other words the age at
which the neurosis breaks out is of greater importance to

the success of psychoanalysis than the age at which
treatment is begun' (Abraham 1919: 316).
Abraham's commentary seems to have had little
impact on an emerging orthodoxy concerning the
relationship between psychoanalysis and later life.

Rechtschaffen (1959), in what appears to be the earliest
review of substance in this area, notes a series of reasons

current in the contemporary literature that undercut
psychodynamic work in mature adulthood. Among a
range of reasoning can be found: reduced ego strength;
defences that cannot take the strain; that the older person
is thereby too open to self-examination; the undesirability
of looking back on the whole of one's life as neurotic and
maladjusted; that induced change may not fit with
possibilities extant in a patient's external life situation,

older people's own reluctance to undertake a kind of
treatment which, for cohort reasons, is assumed to be
reserved for the mad. He concludes, however, that 'there

is no reason to discuss geriatric psychotherapy as distinct
from any other psychotherapy, unless there is some
assumption that there are, or should be, some distinctive
features about it' ( Rechtschaffen 1959: 82).
Rechtschaffen's observations on the commonality of
work between older and other analysands raise a series
of theoretical questions that present an alternative logic
of psychoanalysis as it pertains to age. The first of these

concerns the view that, regardless of external
circumstances, the unconscious is itself timeless. The
second concerns the construal of psychological problems

as patterns of neurotic repetition. Both of these
propositions about the nature of the psyche render
arguments based on the accumulated material that older

people carry with them unpersuasive. In classical
psychoanalysis the unconscious is conceived as
essentially without time and chaotic in character. Thus

the content and process of unconscious material
recovered by the ego is not in itself age-related, although
ego processes may subsequently structure it in that way.
Further, the key determining period for personal identity

occurs in early childhood, with the civilizing resolution of
the oedipal crisis. Other conflicts and tensions during the
lifecourse are seen as reflections of the attempted
resolution of that core determining problem. In other
words, in the normal run of things, both the driving force
and the patterns and processes for personal psychic
equilibrium are more or less set at an early stage and stay
that way for the rest of life. Subsequent neurotic
experiences are simply repetitions of these early patterns,
being played out at other times in the lifecourse.

Whatever the material, then, it should evidence patterns
that are essentially the same in terms of core
psychological processes, however many times those

patterns may be re-enacted. The 'mass of material'
argument does not hold water, following this logic,
because it is the underlying processes that determine the

validity of material, and not vice versa. This
interpretation would explain the absence of reference to

the age of patients in Freud's mature work, as it can
reasonably assumed that he saw it as irrelevant.
The argument against work with older people is
therefore largely speculative, cautious and clearly not

central to psychoanalytic thinking. Curious references to
the negative effects of accumulated material may simply
be a nod in the direction of ageist attitudes current at the
time that Freud was writing. The allusion to reduced
libidinal activity is more difficult to dismiss theoretically,
since it might obtain empirical support. However, in spite
of these remarks in Freud's early writings, which, as we

have seen, touch only briefly on the relationship between
ageing and psychoanalysis, a legacy has been left that
associated the legitimacy of the therapeutic enterprise

with caution as to its value in later life. By 1952,
Hollender was prompted to note, for example, that
'Perhaps the best explanation for the fact that analysis is

not a procedure for people in their fifties and over is that
there is not enough hope in the future to provide the

motivation needed to endure the tensions mobilised by
analysis' (Hollender 1952: 342).
So, arguments concerning the amount of material
accumulated over a long life and the absence of mental
elasticity may not in themselves be sound. They have,

however, contributed to a climate in which it had, by the
1960s, been accepted not only that therapy was
ineffective with mature individuals but also that those
over 40 should be dissuaded from analytic training. While

there is a significant strand of conservatism and
'followership' in this state of affairs, psychoanalysis also
shows itself open to an alternative and more subversive
perspective. Arguments in Freud's work suggest that as

the forces and contradictions that determine personal
psychology are unconscious, and formed at an early age,
chronological age in adulthood is largely irrelevant to

depth psychology. In other words, adult patients should
be treated similarly, regardless of age.
REVISING THE DOCTRINE
During the 1960s and 1970s Pearl King's (1974) was

one of the few dissenting voices against the dominant
view that analysis and maturity were simply not
compatible. She argued that 'particularly between the

ages of 40 and 65' older patients can benefit greatly from
analysis, but because of the prevailing belief system
within psychoanalysis, very few older people actually
found their way into analysis. King describes a

contemporary climate among practising psychoanalysts
in which colleagues would only quietly 'confess' to
working with patients who were over 40 years old. She
failed, however, to get her views accepted within neo-
Freudian circles, and had to present her paper to the
Jungian Society of Analytical Psychology. This was a time
of considerably less eclecticism than the present. Rivalry

existed between these two camps, which, as Homans
(1995) put it, led to a period in which Freudians and
Jungians hated and then just ignored one another.
Regardless of such institutional scepticism, King, her
analysand Hildebrand and a small number of other
analysts maintained an interest in work with older

people. Although this work was often expressed as
extending the benefits of psychodynamic treatment to a
novel population of patients, it marked a trend beginning

to take place across the psychodynamic terrain, which
was later to include work with 'borderline personalities'
on the boundaries of psychosis (Steiner 1993) and people
with learning difficulties (Sinason 1992). Both King

(1974) and Hildebrand (1982,1986) were exercised to
show that psychoanalysis can be used with older adults,
that psychoanalytic theory can explain a widening
lifecourse territory. As such, their approach was both a

radical and, in King's time, dangerous departure from
neo-Freudian orthodoxy.
Reduced rigidity and transference relations
As part of this process, thinking on the nature of late-

life development also began to turn on observations that
had previously been used to discount work with older
people. The first of these realignments concerned the

consequences of lessened libidinal energy, which had
proved such a convincing theoretical barrier to work with
mature patients. The increased flexibility that had been

attributed to a weakening of 'ego-strength' or lessened
'nervous energy' now emerged as an advantage of
working psychoanalytically in mature adulthood.
King (1974) drew on the earlier observation
(Grotjahn 1955) that whereas the demands of external

reality might be perceived by younger adults as a
narcissistic threat to their personal identity, older adults

were less threatened and would thereby exhibit less
resistance to unpleasant insights about themselves. They
were therefore more able to integrate therapeutic
interpretations. She noted a 'new dynamic and sense of
urgency' that mature adults brought to therapy. This
sense was not, however, driven by libidinous instinct, but
a keener awareness of the finite nature of existence. The
lessening of nervous energy 'reduces the need for the

maintenance of the rigidity of their defence systems, so
that [mature adults] are able to assimilate new objects
into their psychic structure ... and they begin to

experience a new sense of their own identity and the value
of their own achievement and worth' (King 1974: 33,
italics in original). King uses the language of true and false

selves to underscore her argument, so that mature
adulthood is seen as constituting a shift from the
presentation of a false to a more authentic identity.

Hildebrand (1986: 22) also discovered that older patients
exhibited 'a good deal of capacity to delay gratification,
allow problems to resolve and take the long view.
Moreover they often have much greater self-reliance than

do younger people and can be left to get on with things by
themselves.' According to the revisionists, then, mature
adults were less driven by achievement in the external

world and more conscious of mortality than younger
adults, differences that made them more, rather than less,

susceptible to psychodynamic change.
A second realignment concerned the nature of the
unconscious associations that the patient and therapist
have towards each other, which in psychoanalysis are
referred to as transference and counter-transference,

respectively. While Rechtschaffen (1959) noted the
existence of 'reverse- transference' when a therapist was
younger than an analysand, King's (1974) observations

on transference phenomena appear to constitute the first
serious consideration of adult subjectivities within the
psychoanalytic tradition. It is here that psychoanalysis

begins to accommodate mature age rather than simply
assimilating it into an existing schema.
The importance of transference stems from its status,
from the earliest days of psychoanalysis, as the main

vehicle through which positive change can occur. This is
because it is by re-experiencing early formative events in
one's relationship with the analyst, and thereby

reworking them, that analysis has its effect. Typically this
process would involve an older analyst being seen as the
parent of the younger patient, and by working through
this relationship afresh and in fantasy form, the patient
can learn to outgrow projections based on childhood and
adopt a more appropriate adult identity. King (1980: 154)
points out, however, that: 'middle aged and elderly clients

may be functioning within a number of different
timescales. These may include a chronological time scale,
a psychological one and a biological one, or unconscious

processes which are paradoxically timeless.' The
implication of this is that the Other, in terms of
transference the analyst, 'can be experienced as any

significant figure from the elderly patient's past,
sometimes covering a span of five generations, and for

any of these transference figures the roles may be
reversed' (ibid.). Mature patients, in other words, may
behave towards the therapist independently of the actual
ages involved and in combinations beyond the traditional
Freudian view in which analysand equals child and

analyst equals parent. Flildebrand (1986) has referred to
this process as an 'inverted' transference because older
patients are just as likely to respond emotionally to the

analyst as a daughter or son as they are as a parent.
Knight (1986, 1996), who adopts an eclectic position on

psychodynamic theory, indicates that therapists and
others may be responded to as if they were the child,
grandchild, parent, spouse or lover of an older person,
depending upon the quality of their emerging
relationship. Further, this may also happen in reverse, so

that those working with older people may themselves
experience counter-transference such that they act out
unconscious associations arising from their own

unresolved conflicts with figures from across the
lifecourse. These tacit influences, if left unexplored, may
explain the resistance of many helping professionals to

work with older people (Biggs 1989).
This reformulation of transference phenomena marks
a considerable shift in the psychodynamic understanding
of intergenerational relations, because it is recognized

that both younger and older participants may now inhabit
a multiplicity of possible age-related spaces. These
identities should, moreover, be valued and not rejected as

'resistances' or as in some way perverse. The extension of
transference phenomena across the lifecourse further
facilitates the unpeeling of chronological from
psychological age and, in so doing, contributes to the
deconstruction of common-sense stereotypes of ageing.
The defining presence of childhood
In her paper, King (1980) gives two case examples of

patients: a man in his 'early sixties' and a woman in her
'fifties'. Both cases are used to illustrate the idea that life
transitions can provoke the reworking of unresolved

neurotic conflicts from earlier life phases. 'For middle
aged and elderly patients', she states, 'the traumas and
psychopathology of puberty and adolescence must be re-

experienced and worked through in the transference
whatever early infantile material is also dealt with. One
reason for this may be that the middle aged individual is
having to face many of the same problems as he did in his

adolescence, but this time in reverse' (King 1980: 156).
The problems that King refers to include sexual and
biological change and changes to social roles and

relationships. Each transition contributes to conflicts
around dependency and independence. Here,
psychological conflict and change is seen as part and
parcel of later life. However, a closer reading indicates
that change in maturity has been positioned in a
particular way. Hidden behind this transitional model is a
logic familiar to the neo-Freudian tradition. Mid- and late-
life transitions are effectively seen as a third and possibly

fourth reworking of early conflicts, the second being
maturational and identity transitions in adolescence.
Adolescence is itself seen as a 'genital' working through of

an original oedipal conflict. The oedipal is thus primary,
but resurfaces in different forms at different times over
the lifecourse. In this respect King is, at base, presenting a

highly orthodox psychoanalytic position, giving little
consideration to the unique existential tasks that might
face individuals in later life.
References to work with older patients, which are few
and far between in the psychoanalytic literature, almost

always reflect a focus on conflicts resonant of childhood.
Hannah Segal (1958: 174), for example, described the

analysis of an elderly man who was thought to be
'unconsciously terrified of old age and death which he
perceived as a persecution'. She saw in this anxiety a
failure to incorporate ambivalence. This is normally

resolved by working through what, in Kleinian terms,
would be the psychological transition from a
paranoid/schizoid splitting of good from bad to a
depressive position in which one can cope with

complexity and concern for others. The resolution of both
positions is thought to take place in the earliest years of
life. Similarly, Nina Colthart (1991), while sensitive to

specific features particular to work with older patients,
indicates that the core processes underlying
psychological distress lead back to childhood experiences.

During the analysis of two men, one aged in his seventies,
the other in his late fifties to early sixties (analysis taking

several years to complete), she considered that early life
experiences were relived in 'a remarkable, and condensed
way'. Thus, 'The dynamic quality of sequential periods of
life resembles a series of plays, with existing characters
taking on new roles as the scenarios shift and

development takes place' (Colthart 1991: 210).
In summarizing this position it would seem that,
whereas the ground on which conflicts take place may
change with age, causative factors can be reduced to

traditional psychodynamic explanations, based on
childhood experience. In explanatory terms, most
lifecourse phenomena can be reduced to the primacy of
childhood.
THE HIDDEN LEGACY
At this point it is possible to summarize
psychoanalytic arguments on the status of ageing (see

Figure 1.1). The contention that mature adults have too
much life experience and are unmotivated can be
contrasted with the timelessness of the unconscious and

the repetition of personal conflicts. Further development
has emphasized a reduced rigidity and greater urgency in
later life, while maintaining the central influence of
childhood experience.
Figure 1.1 Psychoanalysis and the mature imagination
It appears from this review of the changing
relationship between psychoanalysis and adult ageing
that the primary contribution to understanding the
authentic subjective experience of mid and later life arises

from an unpeeling of external referents to ageing, such as
chronological age and immediate appearance, from the
inner life of the ageing individual. The question of an

ageing identity is posed in terms of the hidden and the
surface and is most apparent in discussion of
intergenerational transference and counter-transference

relations. This unpeeling facilitates the awareness of
multiple identifications that are based on age and frees
the inner life of the active subject from the constraints of

social expectation, which in this case can be seen in the
traditional psychoanalytic posture of analyst as parent
and analysand as child. As a consequence of this
observation, it is possible to conceive of age-based

identities both as existing independently of the age of the
patient and as opening identity management up to the

possibilities of explicit and tacit, overt and disguised
presentations of self.
The inner world of the mature adult may therefore
contain a series of optional age-related identities that
come in and out of focus depending upon the
circumstances that mature adults find themselves in. The

degree of control that can be gained over these possible
presentations might depend upon a natural process of
psychological maturation or on the practice of

psychoanalysis itself, although, perhaps unsurprisingly,
supporters of the psychoanalytic method favour the latter
interpretation. The relationship between the overt and

the disguised that is being suggested here differs from the
original formulation of material hidden in the
unconscious versus that made knowable to the ego.
Rather, an expansion of this formulation suggests that
both the surface and the hidden can be knowable to the
subject, such that one knows that one's appearance no
longer conveys radiant youth yet one can feel young, old
or in between, beyond physical and social constraints
associated with age.
However, the continuing disadvantage that emerges
from the psychoanalytic literature concerns the reduction
of adult problems to their childhood causes. This
assertion constitutes a core belief within the
psychoanalytic tradition and is unlikely to be changed:

indeed, it is likely that there are many adults in midlife
and beyond who are still restricted and in some cases
mentally tortured by the repetition of the identity issues

arising in early childhood. The problem that this poses for
an examination of the mature imagination is not
insignificant. At a most transparent level, we are told little

about the particular subjectivity of mid and late
adulthood if this is conceived of as the replaying of

oedipal conflicts. The privileging of oedipal identifications
means that other processes occurring in the adult psyche
are either under-emphasized or simply seen as
distractions from the primary objective of reworking that
conflict in order to achieve an identity that is more at ease

with itself. These other processes are thereby denied
voice by the dominant discourse. At a wider, tacit level,
the privileging of childhood, even among the most

progressive, age-sensitized psychoanalysts, contributes to
a construction of late life development as of lesser

importance, thus aligning it with other ageist beliefs in
contemporary society. Thus, the story that psychoanalysis
tells us about mature adulthood is that its centre of
gravity lies elsewhere and that change does not depend
upon issues and priorities in the present. Indeed, not only

is the past privileged as holding the key to current
problems, the process of psychoanalysis constitutes a
method of liberation from constraints found there.
At the level of shaping mature adulthood, of
answering the question of where older adults appear in
the plot, they appear as the significant adults of one's

childhood. In other words, they come to represent that
which must be rejected in the present and are potentially
negative contributors to the life phase one is currently in.

It is not simply that mainstream psychoanalysis
characterizes older adults as difficult in treatment, but
that it also positions them as marginal in the world view
that it promotes as a potential personal narrative and as a

cultural arbiter of social significance. Psychoanalysis
leaves an inheritance that is highly ambivalent towards
adult ageing. On the one hand, it opens the possibility of

multiple internal perspectives on mature identity. On the
other, it appears to sideline the subjective experience of
ageing, excepting when it can be interpreted in relation to
childhood experience.
The story of identity drawn by the psychodynamic

tradition does not end with debates within
psychoanalysis itself. Two perspectives have drawn on

the insights of this approach and have expanded upon
adult development in very different ways. It is to them
that we now turn.
2
From ego psychology to the active imagination
Two psychodynamic thinkers have influenced

contemporary conceptions of mature identity more than
any others. Erik Erikson has developed ideas, latent
within psychoanalysis, that expand the role of the

conscious ego and thereby link the self more closely to
the social world. Carl Gustav Jung was principally
interested in the development of self-expression in

adulthood, and made a clear distinction between the
preoccupations of childhood and what he called the

'second half of life'. Both have expanded on the
relationship between adult identity and the spaces

allotted to it in everyday life.
ERIK ERIKSON AND EGO PSYCHOLOGY
It is hard to over-emphasize the influence of Erikson's
theorizing on the lifecourse, which in his later years took

the form of a closer examination of later life itself.
Sugarman (1986: 83), for example, refers to its 'pride of
place when the whole life span is considered'. Erikson's

model moved psychodynamic thinking on from a
preoccupation with psycho-sexual development to
psycho-social adaptation. That is to say, whereas

psychoanalysis concerned itself with how the ego might
control unconscious drives and impulses, ego psychology,
of which Erikson's ideas are a part, paid closer attention

to the role of conscious awareness and its relation to
social adaptation. This led to a reduced conceptual
emphasis on libidinal energy as both a motor for

psychological change and a primitive force that needed to
be channelled. Instead, Freud's original ideas on the

civilizing influence of the ego were extended, creating an
increased role for social expectation as a formative
influence on psychological development. This
development in psychodynamic theory better fitted the
historical and cultural climate that Erikson and other ego

psychologists, such as Fromm (1956) and Horney (1955),
found in the post-war society of the United States. In

terms of the lifecourse, it led to a growth of interest in
consciousness beyond childhood, and thus a more
developed view on the position of mature adulthood and
old age. It also led to the abandonment of preoccupations
with the reduced psychological motivation that European
psychoanalysis had come to associate with later life.
The Eriksonian life cycle
The lifecourse, or 'life cycle' as it is called within the
model, is seen to consist of eight age-stages, within which

a series of psycho-social crises, bipolar conflicts and their
resolution determine the form taken by personal
development. It is proposed that the stage a person is

currently at lends coherence to the perception of
preceding and subsequent experience, so that each stage

'is grounded in all the previous ones; while in each the
developmental maturation (and psycho-social crisis) of

one of these virtues gives new connotations to all the
"lower" and already developed stages as well as the
higher and still developing ones. This can never be said
often enough' (Erikson 1982: 59).
Erikson has, on first examination, replaced the

defining power of childhood with something else, that
something else being the stage of life that an individual is
currently experiencing. The centrality of whichever stage
the subject is in adds depth to the different
preoccupations that growing individuals exhibit. It helps

to explain why elders interviewed in Erikson et al.'s
(1986) longitudinal study gave little emphasis to or
simply ignored events that, at the time of happening, were

seen as important and potentially traumatic. This process
provides a sense of personal continuity while ensuring
the ongoing development of individual identity. The

perception of continuity and achievement is important to
the Eriksonian scheme of things, and continuity, to be
fully functional, must look forward as well as back if it is

to lend coherence to the experience of self.
The eight stages contained within the model are

infancy, early childhood, the play age, school age,
adolescence, young adulthood, adulthood and old age,

each with its own special conflict to be negotiated. In
adulthood, for example, it is argued that the core tensions
that have to be resolved are between generativity and
stagnation, and that the conflict that this bipolarity

represents concerns an attitude towards caring. In old
age, tension is said to exist between integrity on the one
hand and disgust and despair on the other. The resolution
of this conflict will influence the achievement of wisdom

at the end of the lifecourse. It can be seen from these
examples that the bipolarities described by Erikson are
evaluative in tone, suggesting the nature of a successful

outcome at any one stage.
In The Life Cycle Completed, Erikson (1982: 55)
describes his age-stage model as enumerating the 'Basic

qualities that "qualify" a young person to enter the
generational cycle—and an adult to conclude it.' This
process engages the individual with existing social

structures such that a 'Widening radius of interpersonal
relations leads, at each stage, to that contact with new
sections of the social order, which thus provide, even as
they depend on, individual development' (Erikson et al.

1986: 39). Kivnick describes the 'eight psycho-social
themes as a kind of scaffolding around which people
construct their lives, from beginning to end' (Kivnick
1993: 20). There is thus a close association within the

model between personal development and the social
order, such that the latter gives shape to personal
development.
Vaillant (1993) claims empirical support for Erikson's

stages across class and gender divides, adding two stages.
Career consolidation has been inserted between young

adulthood and adult generativity, with a 'keeper of
meaning' role appearing between adulthood and old age.
The focus here is on the balance that can be achieved as
one moves from one stage to another and on 'the

developing adult's ego capacity to master and feel at
home in an increasingly complex social radius' (Vaillant
1993: 146). 'Career consolidation' therefore 'involves the

transformation of preoccupation with self, of commitment
to an adolescent hobby, and of "seeking the bauble of
reputation", into a specialised role valued by both self and
society' (Vaillant 1993: 146).
Erikson's model has arguably achieved greatest fame

from the identification of an adolescent identity crisis.
This crisis acts as the formative period for entry into

adulthood, and has been elaborated by Marcia (1966).
Here, conflict exists between the establishment of a
secure or confused identity, involving a process of
exploration and commitment, after which one 'achieves
identity'. The popularity of Eriksonian views on identity

may owe something to the growth of youth culture and
associated moral panics that occurred at approximately
the same historical period as the publication of his

seminal work Childhood and Society, first published in
1950 and revised in 1963. Adolescent identity formation
is positioned as the gateway into full adulthood. Thus, on

closer examination, identity formation is of secondary
value within the Eriksonian lifecourse. Its value depends
on the degree to which the identity that is fixed creates a

stable basis for generativity in work and family life that
takes place during the fully adult and generative stage.
At the other end of adulthood, Erikson proposes a
conflict variously described as being between wisdom

and disdain, and integrity and despair. Both of these
bipolar conflicts refer to tensions around a final
integration of the personality, which Erikson refers to as
'integrality'. According to this view, the great challenge of

late life is to maintain a sense of personal 'integrality',
which has been defined as 'a tendency to keep things
together' (Erikson 1982: 65). Integrality would seem to
include two simultaneous themes: an ability to keep body

and soul together in the face of physical ageing and the
loss of significant others; and the development of a
convincing and coherent life story which sums up an

individual's lived experience. In other words, the final
life-task consists of the 'acceptance of one's own and only
life cycle and of the people who have become significant

to it as something that had to be and that, by necessity,
permitted no substitutions. It thus means ... An

acceptance of the fact that one's life is one's own
responsibility' (Erikson 1963: 98).
Subsequently, interest in integrality has been
superceded by the positive but less complex notion of
integrity. Rennemark and Hagberg (1997) have

attempted to associate particular aspects of personal
integrity with the remembrance of different age stages in
late life. They have operationalized integrity as 'a sense of
coherence in perceived life history', such that a coherent

relationship between one's remembered past and present
existence is positively related to personal well-being.
They found that the stages most cited by elders as being
influential were childhood and adolescence. However,

elders who were not happy in late life were more likely to
relate their current circumstances to the 'adult' stage of
generativity. There is, however, a difficulty in posing the

defining characteristic of late life as coherence, as an
ability to draw the strands of a lifecourse together,
because according to the Eriksonian schema this fails to

distinguish it from other stages. The process of making
sense of one's lived experience from the standpoint of tire

stage one is in, is, as has been noted above, part and
parcel of each stage of development. While this has the
advantage of reducing barriers between old age and other
parts of the lifecourse, it leaves it with little by way of
original qualities. Further, as the eighth and final stage of

old age is primarily concerned with making retrospective
sense of a lived life and then handing on the lessons
learned, it is singularly disadvantaged as a source of

coherence. Conceptually speaking, the last phase can only
look back. It cannot look forward in terms of personal

development.
The problem, as Erikson et al. (1986) have seen it, is
that 'the fabric of society, the centre, "does not hold" the
aged', which is a significant difficulty for a model that
relies heavily on psycho-social adjustment to structure

the lifecourse. While midlife holds the promise of 'a vivid
generational interplay', the final period of Erikson's life
cycle concerns the predominantly personal and asocial

task of 'existential integrity'. In order to integrate the
eighth stage into Erikson's system, some conceptual glue
must be found from elsewhere.
Two sources, two means, of psycho-social coherence
can be found in the work of Eriksonian thinkers. First, as
Erikson et al. (1986:14) point out, preceding stages must
be used to structure and prefigure old age. Thus, 'From

here on, old age must be planned, which means that
mature (and one hopes well informed) middle-aged
adults must become and remain aware of the long life

stages that lie ahead.' Midlife generativity, with its
capability of looking forwards as well as backwards, must
lay the foundations for late-life integrity, which, after all,
can only look back and engage in what has been
characterized as a 'grand wrapping-up' (Biggs 1993a).
Second, Kivnick (1988) has suggested that psycho-
social meaning might lie in 'post-maintenance

generativity' or 'grand-generativity', which, in her
understanding, is closely related to grandparenthood. The

purpose of the eighth stage, according to this view, would
be to support the core tasks of generativity itself, which
lie within the preceding stage. This view has been
criticized as both conferring a second-hand meaning to

later life and assuming that only a certain form of family
relationship can facilitate fulfilment (Biggs 1993). It does,
however, solve the problem of establishing a meaningful

subjectivity in later life by extending the reach of the
activities of the preceding stage.
A number of ego psychologists have devised

pathways that help create a meaningful, if second-hand
existence in later life. Kivnick (1993: 20) goes on to

suggest a programme of improving activities for late-life
development, including: '1. Working with elders by

building on past strengths; 2. Encouraging the middle-
aged and the young-old to prepare for old age by
thoughtful anticipation; and 3. Promoting
intergenerational interaction for the psychosocial benefit
of the old and not-yet-old.'
Vaillant (1993: 151) suggests that the change of focus
involved in post-generative age-stages can be conceived
of as a shift from 'taking care of one's children to

preserving one's culture'. This view introduces a special
task for later life, but also fails to solve the core
predicament of authentic subjectivity. Preserving culture

is seen as a more abstract, sublimated means of caring
and as a way of passing accumulated knowledge on to the
next generation. Thus, whereas the twin anxieties of

preceding adult stages centre on 'How can I commit
myself to one person and one job without sacrificing

autonomy?'... 'Older adults, having safely mastered these
tasks, may, as mentors watch this struggle with the same

benevolent familiarity with which young adults watch
their children' (Vaillant 1993: 146). This shift also fulfils
the function of investing in forms of meaning that will
outlive the self (Kotre 1984) and the insurance of

individual immortality through the direction of others.
Alexander et al. (1992) consider this to be a particularly
individualistic interpretation of passing experience on to
succeeding generations which owes much to the priorities

of western capitalism.
Generativity and authenticity
As both the conflicts and resolutions of adolescence

and old age appear to hinge on life tasks of adulthood, it is
worth examining the nature of this central stage in more
detail.
At the end of Erikson's summary of his eighth and
final stage, one finds this rather curious statement:
'having now reviewed the end of the lifecycle as much as

my context permitted, I do feel the urgency to enlarge on
a "real" stage—that is, one that mediates between two

stages of life—and of the generational cycle itself'
(Erikson 1982: 66). He is referring here to the preceding

stage, 'generativity', which looks forwards as well as
backwards and is concerned with production and
reproduction.
Generativity, according to Erikson (1982: 67),
expresses the 'spirit of adulthood', which consists of 'the
maintenance of the world'. The virtue of this period is
care, 'a widening commitment to take care of the persons,
the products, and the ideas one has learned to care for’
(italics in original). It encompasses, 'procreativity,
productivity and creativity'. McAdams (1988: 276) refers

to generativity as 'An action outline for the future which
specifies what an individual plans to do in order to leave a
legacy of self to the next generation.' This takes place in

two steps, namely creating a product and caring for that
product. McAdams is most interested in the development

of a life story or narrative that can sustain identity and, in
this context, procreation and care suggest an extension of
self and then a giving up, a recognition of autonomy in the
other which makes it simultaneously self and not self. The

result becomes a 'life justifying legacy' (McAdams 1985:
276). Thus, a closer reading of generativity itself suggests

that the focus of this lifecourse activity is to contribute to
what has been called above the 'generational cycle'.
Generativity itself is important, in other words, because of
the children.
As such, ego psychology resembles disengagement
theory (Cumming and Henry 1961) insofar as the
subjectivity of personal ageing becomes displaced by a
growing focus on self in relation to family, plus an

absence of other supportive role options. In both cases
the progressive marginality of an ageing identity is
cloaked in the guise of its functional value for wider social

interests.
It is becoming clear, then, that while generativity
rests at the heart of ego psychology, it is also difficult to

find an authentic adult subjectivity inside it. While
generativity is seen as the central task of mature
adulthood, it tells us little about the intrinsic experience
of self. Rather, the focus of generativity is again outside

the stage itself and concerns the care of others, at other
stages. Most notable of these other stages are those of
childhood, the function of a mature adult identity being to

create the optimal circumstances for successful
reproduction of the next generation. Thus other tasks
associated with adulthood, such as work and stability in
relationships, feed in to this primary organizing principle.
This leaves us with the Eriksonian lifecourse as a sort of
continuing cycle, without a personally intrinsic centre, for
just as childhood is seen as a series of challenges that

must be negotiated to become a functional adult,
adulthood is seen as a period devoted to creating the
conditions for the child's integration into society. As the

wrappings of an Eriksonian lifecourse unravel, it appears,
then, as a series of Chinese boxes. Each stage, at least in
mid and late adulthood, is essentially empty of meaning

except insofar as it contains another (see Figure 2.1). And
the most problematic of these boxes is the one labelled

'old age', because it is unclear how an authentic role can
be found at the end of the lifecourse. Just as you think
you've got to that most important, generative, box, you
find yourself back at the beginning again.
Figure 2.1 Erikson’s adult life stages as Chinese boxes.
This problem, 'the problem of the Chinese boxes',
highlights a pivotal difference between childhood stages
and those of adulthood as conceived in this form of
theorizing. Adolescence, it appears, does not simply

signify the challenge of developing a stable adult identity,
but also marks a qualitative difference in the nature of the
bipolar conflicts contained within the stages that precede

it and those that follow it. It contains, in other words, a
conceptual transition within Erikson's theorizing as well
as a practical transition in identity. Childhood priorities,

including the development of trust, autonomy, initiative
and industry, while they rely upon external conditions,
are theorized as intrinsic to the developing psyche. They

tell us about the subjective experience of each stage as a
form of personal development which is aimed at the self,
rather than the development of others. As such they tell
us about the experiential reality of childhood for its own

sake. This is not the case for generativity and beyond,
whose focus, in this sense, is not centred on existential
questions of personal development because the key
source of fulfilment exists outside the self. The
development of others has become the dominant factor in
determining any insight the model might give into adult
subjectivity. Other aspects are eclipsed except insofar as

they can subsist within that age-stage framework.
Another way of putting this is to imagine the practical

implications of the conceptual model were they to be
applied to a therapeutic context. Up until adolescence, an
Eriksonian therapist might take a keen interest in you,
your experience and mastery of the world, but after

adolescence there is a sudden shift: he or she no longer
seems interested in you, only in how successful you are in
bringing up the kids and contributing to your workplace.

Prior to that age the theory tells a story based on an
authentic exploration of self; after it, it does not.
Thus the Eriksonian perspective is, at the core of its
theoretical reasoning, child-centred, and tells us little
about the cultivation of self in the mature imagination.
This is so much the case that even the elders interviewed

in Vital Involvement in Old Age turn out to be the parents
of children interviewed in the original longitudinal study

(Erikson et al. 1986: 21). This observation in itself
suggests an alternative explanation to why Erikson et al.'s
(1986) interviewees did not remember the trials and
crises noted in the original longitudinal study. The
problems were those of their children's development
rather than their own.
This child centredness differs from that of classical
Freudianism. For Freud, the prime concern was to allow

adults to shake off problems arising from childhood, thus
containing the tendency to see the internal workings of
the mind as dominated by conflicts arising from early
development. For Erikson, the primary focus of adulthood

would be to raise the next generation, and our
understanding of the adult psyche is only seriously
examined insofar as it contributes to that objective. This
is what one might expect from a man who undertook his

own analysis with Anna Freud, a founder of child and
family psychotherapy and whose own generative age-
stage concerned the relationship between childhood and

society. Viewed in this light, it is unsurprising that
Erikson's schema focuses predominantly on the early
years of life, with only two from eight stages referring to
mature adulthood (Jacobs 1986). The surprise, perhaps, is
that he has been heralded so widely as a champion of
later life development, presumably because of a dearth of
alternatives at the time.
Ego psychology and Fordism
Whilst ego psychology does not appear to see
childhood as formative in the Freudian sense, its reliance
on generativity as a source of adult coherence places

child-rearing as the core task for a mature imagination.
There is a social conformity hiding within the
commonsensual 'obviousness' of the age-stage model.

The age-stage approach has been criticized by Buss
(1979) and Andrews (1991) as being too individualistic

and as failing to recognize social and cultural influences
on development. It is also possible to argue that the core

failure of age-staging consists of its inability to step
beyond the social context in which it is embedded. It is, in
other words, so influenced by social structures as never
to get beyond them. For Erikson (1982: 90), the
embedding nature of social structure lends that necessary

coherence to the lifecourse as it 'lifts the known facts into
a context apt to make us realise their nature'. This results
in an uncritical relation to that context, which has been
exacerbated by the subsequent work of Vaillant (1993)
and Kivnick (1993), which has drained earlier
explorations of ego psychology of its conflictual tensions

and problematic.
In retrospect it is possible to see, within the eight

stages of development, a 'Fordist' or production line
model of the lifecourse, closely related to the needs of
contemporary capital at the time that Erikson and others
were generating their theoretical ideas. If the fulcrum of

the lifecourse can be found in the generation of a stable
career and family, then just as one's ability to produce
and reproduce accrues value under capitalism, a
successful lifecourse positions childhood and later life as

a preparation for and hangover from the 'real business' of
making things and people in the material world.
Unfortunately, as Lynott and Lynott (1996) have pointed

out, this historical period was also marked by implicit
theorizing, based on a belief that truths about human
development were increasingly being discovered and that
universal patterns of ageing identity were being observed
independently of socio-historical context. Thus, rather
than stages being seen as one possible way of
conceptualizing the lifecourse, they were perceived as the
one and only way. The result was a preoccupation with

function, adjustment and fit of lifestyle to the demands of
contemporary production. An example of this in Erikson's
own research can be seen in the degree to which cohort

effects are taken as normative. In Vital Involvement in Old
Age, 29 elders were interviewed, from the same cohort as
the Eriksons themselves. This is presented as a positive

advantage by the investigators, insofar as it increases
empathy and mutual understanding. However, its
disadvantage, that it obscures the identification of shared

assumptive realities, is not explored. Both the functional
approach adopted and cohort specificity mean that
investigators might not recognize change, or might
minimize its impact if a predetermined life cycle itself

minimizes crises and obscures alternatives. By the
symbolic ordering of events being handed over to society,
the possibility of legitimate construction of other
personal narratives is lost.
Schroots (1996: 744) has indicated that stage
theories have difficulty in accommodating an increase in
psycho-social variability that occurs with age because
'The developmental tasks of an infant are relatively

universal, but the tasks in later life are dependent as
much on personal experiences as on general principles.'
Thus, the older the stage, the greater the psycho-social

diversity. A stage-based model, with fixed and functional
definitions of appropriate development, would, according
to this argument, become increasingly unable to contain

the variety of experience that maturity and later life have
accrued. This is another way of saying that stage-based
models with fixed characteristics become increasingly

inappropriate with age, especially if they are premised on
a limited and conformist vision of what late life might
hold.
The value of ego psychology for the mature imagination
So where does this analysis of the Eriksonian life
cycle leave us in terms of the positioning of mature and

late adulthood? It can now be seen that while a move
towards ego-functioning avoids some of the conceptual
problems inherent in classical psychoanalysis, it has
created new difficulties for the understanding of self and
identity in midlife and beyond and reshaped some old

ones. The much anticipated focus on adult development
that was promised by ego psychology seems on second
inspection to be essentially hollow. Again the question

turns on the centrality of childhood and the uncritical
acceptance of contemporary social stereotypes of adult
ageing. The deep structure of the approach is child-

centred in a number of respects. Most notably, a critical
analysis of the internal structure of the position indicates

that adult stages not only draw their primary meaning
from earlier stages, they cease to achieve independent
existential priorities. Further, qualitative differences
between childhood stages of development and adult ones
subtly privilege the former. It is not so much that

childhood is seen as formative in this model, rather that it
is presented as more interesting and valuable. At each
stage, however, the conflicts and priorities approach

descriptions of socially accepted milestones, each of
which contains a right and wrong direction. This is not

simply a chronological contingency, but a contingency of
meaning and experience. Erikson's real creativity lies in
what he has to say about psychological development
concerning social expectation and child-rearing. There is
a stark absence of interest in a subjectivity of adulthood.
The positioning of mature adulthood emerging from
ego psychology is very much of a second-hand existence.

Generativity emerges as core to adult identity and at the
centre of this one finds procreation. Later life relies on
prior good planning and an interest in handing on to
younger generations. Inner directed growth of the adult

psyche is not subject to significant conceptual
elaboration; instead followers of Erikson have increased
an emphasis on coherence, and an uncritical elaboration
of social conformity.
Whereas it has been argued that King's (1974, 1980)

debate within psychoanalysis achieved an unpeeling of
subjective and social attributes associated with
chronological age, Erikson and his followers have been

busy restitching consciousness and the social order. What
becomes apparent is the centrality of generativity as the
fulcrum of the human lifecourse. However, while the adult
lifecourse would appear to depend on generativity, this is
itself contingent upon reproduction and conformity to
economic productive processes. If adolescence marks the

entry into an enduring adult identity, mid-adulthood
marks its fruition in production and reproduction and,
most notably, the creation of the next generation. The

integrity of old age is doubly disadvantaged within this
system. First, as a final stage, it can look only back and not
forwards within the constraints of the model. Second,

successful negotiation of this final stage is seen as
contingent both on previous planning at other stages and
on being able to contribute vicariously to the tasks

allotted to those preceding stages. One therefore needs to
look elsewhere for the germ of a critical adult psychology.
JUNG AND ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY
If Erikson's response to an underdeveloped
psychodynamic theorizing of maturity was to create a
system that tied adaptive development to social

expectation, Jung travelled in the opposite direction.
Where Erikson and his followers have explored the
relationship between the ego and the social world such
that fantasy activity is almost entirely eclipsed, Jung's
analytical psychology looked for meaning in an
increasingly close relationship between the ego and an

inner world of the imagination. Where ego psychology
positioned later life as a period of second-hand
fulfilments and functions, analytical psychology suggested

that the aims and objectives of mature adulthood had
little in common with those of earlier adult life at all.
Whereas Erikson can be seen as developing aspects of

psychoanalysis in a linear progression from Anna and
Sigmund Freud, Jung's intellectual development is

marked by a fundamental split from the founding
discipline.
From psychoanalysis to an analysis of adulthood
When Jung and Freud argued about the nature of
therapy and the interpretation of previously unconscious
material, the break was irreparable (McGuire 1991). It

heralded a period of turmoil and acrimonious debate
which eventually resulted in the development of
analytical psychology, as Jung came to call his own
version of psychotherapy and its accompanying
theoretical position. As part of this reformulation Jung
explored a number of ideas that have made analytic
psychology a far more receptive framework for the

examination of issues in mature adulthood.
First, Jung found it necessary to formulate his own

dissatisfactions with the psychoanalytic model, which he
found both restrictive and reductive. It was restrictive
insofar as it contained a model of the psyche that had
become something of an article of faith in terms of

structure and the primacy of sexuality. It was reductive
insofar as the formative influences on adult identity had
been reduced to the resolution of oedipal conflicts in

childhood. Second, as part of the break with Freud, which
occurred during 1912 and 1913, Jung lost his own
analyst. Without Freud to guide him, Jung was forced to
engage in self-analysis and developed what he later called

the process of active imagination. Third, movement
beyond the theoretical strait-jacket of mainstream
psychoanalysis and the development of his own
methodology allowed Jung to formulate a new model of

the psyche that began to address the workings of adult
psychology in itself and within its own terms of reference.
Jung's dissatisfaction with the psychoanalytic model
can be seen in his essay The Transcendent Function,

written in 1916. As Homans (1995) has pointed out,
Jung's view was that in an initial period of psychotherapy,

things progressed very much as Freud would have
predicted. Transference relationships were formed
around parental role relationships, which could, if
therapy were successful, be used to rework dysfunctional

solutions set originally in childhood. Thus dreams and
other phenomena originating from the unconscious could
be accurately seen as giving shape to libidinal energy,

itself based on childhood sexuality and the personal route
taken to oedipal resolution. However, Jung maintained
that while psychoanalysis helps to clear away the
unfinished business of childhood, it has nothing to say

about what happens next. The adult is thought to be cured
and that is that.
The inadequacy of psychoanalysis stemmed from its

silence on how to interpret the new situations and
possibilities made available by the removal of these
childhood problems and the resulting release of
psychological energy that had previously been repressed.
'The continued application of Freudian techniques does

not help in this new situation, for the patient has already
assimilated the contents of these interpretations ... hence
a new conceptual framework is required to account for

this process' (Homans 1995: 97). According to Homans,
this realization created a turning point in analytical
psychology that resulted in a new understanding of

transference and a distinction being made between a
personal unconscious, containing memories from an
individual's own history, and collective patterns within

the psyche, such as archetypal images that depend on
universal forms of human experience. It also contributed
to a new formulation of the adult lifecourse which could
now be thought of as consisting of first and second halves

of life.
First and second halves of adult life
In Jung's new formulation, the first half of life, which
spans early adulthood up to middle age, consists of a
period in which identity is consolidated around the
personal will, and as part of this process the constraints
of childhood need to be cast aside. It is thus 'Enough to
clear away all the obstacles that hinder expansion and

ascent' (Jung 1967d: 114), the object of which is to 'win
for oneself a place in society and to transform one's
nature so that it is more or less fitted in to this kind of

existence' (Jung 1967d: 771). The kind of existence that is
being referred to concerns the adaptation of the inner
world of the younger adult to the demands of her or his

social environment. Thus, while the first half of life feels
as if it is a period of increasing freedom from the personal

past, it is, in reality, running to embrace the snares of
social conformity. Of course, Jung is having a little dig at
Freud here, as traditional psychoanalysis has now itself
been reduced to the technology of social control.
Psychoanalysis thereby fails to transcend and ultimately

results in the restoration of a social persona. By contrast,
the task of the second half of life, and for Jung this
represented a road to authentic self-knowledge, was to

'divest the self of the false wrappings of the persona on
the one hand, and the suggestive power of primordial

images on the other' (Jung 1967b: 269).
A need for social achievement and acceptance during
the first half of life is replaced by a desire for personal
coherence and completeness in the second. When
compared to Freudian analytic theory, analytic

psychology was, Jung claimed, allied to a constructive as
opposed to a reductive view of adult development, and
one which pointed towards the future rather than looking

back to the personal past. It therefore developed beyond
the clearing away of persistent infantile desires towards
the assimilation of wider elements of the unconscious. As

one ceases to look over one's shoulder at past constraints,
attention is also drawn to the limits to future existence, as
death becomes an increasingly important point of

personal reference (see Figure 2.2).
Figure 2.2 Jungian 'halves of adult life'.
The core task of this second half of life concerns what
Jung called individuation. Individuation has been
described by Samuels et al. (1986) as the process by

which persons become themselves, 'whole, indivisible
and distinct from others', and results in successively

greater territories of the self becoming amenable to
consciousness. Thus 'a person in the second half of life ...
no longer needs to educate his conscious will, but... to
understand the meaning of his individual life, needs to

experience his own inner being. Social usefulness is no
longer an aim for him, although he does not deny its
desirability ... increasingly, too, this activity frees him

from morbid dependence, and he thus acquires an inner
stability and new trust in himself' (Jung 1967e: 110). The

process of individuation is seen as naturally occurring in
the second half of life, and 'the transformation processes
which make the transition possible have long been

prepared in the unconscious and are only waiting to be
released' (Jung 1933a: 528).
Awareness of a change in life priorities is thought to
begin between the ages of 35 and 40, although

chronological ages are only approximate as Jung saw the
unconscious as relatively autonomous, with a life of its
own and a time scale that 'will out'. From this perspective
'separating and objectifying the unconscious is essentially
a process of maturity' and an 'Active imagination is the

germ material of later life' (Weaver 1973: 11).
Thus, according to the Jungian model, first and second

halves of adult life contain markedly different existential
goals, which provide the spadework for an authentic
subjectivity for mature adulthood. Further, discussion of
the adult lifecourse has been separated from issues of

illness and cure, and in reading Jung, one is given a series
of signposts towards what a general subjectivity of
maturity might look like. The tasks associated with this
second period involve the discovery of parts of the self

that had been repressed during the first half's search for
conformity, an increased sensitivity to an inner life
beyond the limits of the personal will and a looking

forward, induced, in part, by an increasing awareness of
finitude and mortality (Biggs 1993a).
'Getting stuck' and the active imagination
It is clear from Jung's writings that he did not simply
develop a new typology for adult development, but also
found that new therapeutic methods were required when

addressing mid- and late-life development. Unlike the
situation in psychoanalysis, there is considerable
evidence that the founder of analytical psychology had

significant experience of working with mature adults, the
majority of whom were women. In The Aims of
Psychotherapy (1931: 83), for example, Jung states that

'About a third of my cases are not suffering from any
clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness
and aimlessness of their lives... Fully two thirds of my

patients are in the second half of life.'
The problems brought by mature patients are more
often than not referred to as 'getting stuck', as the

priorities of the first half of life cease to provide meaning.
Jung recommended abandoning the strictures of

psychoanalysis in favour of a non-directive and open-
ended approach to this problem. 'I resolved for the
present not to bring any theoretical premises to bear
upon them, but to wait and see what they would tell of
their own accord. My aim became to leave things to
chance' (Jung 1961: 170). The ultimate aim of
psychoanalysis was to ensure that patients are freed to
continue to use the unconscious in their everyday lives,
rather than being driven by it. The object of this new

method was to enhance a process of increased
individuation, which was thought to occur naturally in
maturity, when circumstances allowed.
The method suggested by analytic psychology has
come to be called 'active imagination'. Chodorow (1997)
suggests that Jung began to experiment with active

imagination, between 1913 and 1916, as a 'middle-aged
man in crisis', although he did not publish his findings
until much later (1935). For Jung, the great benefit of
active imagination was that it enabled the distinguishing

of oneself from the unconscious contents of the
imagination. This he contrasted with the experience of
dreams, in which the imagination passively received

communications from the unconscious such that the
dreaming subject was totally immersed in the dream
world. Just as in everyday life an absence of awareness of
unconscious influences can lead to the acting out of their
dynamic, so dreaming failed to allow the dreamer to
recognize that he or she was dreaming. The object of
active imagination was to separate out the conscious ego
from the imaginative material in order to achieve a

dialogue between the two. Thus, 'A product is created
which is influenced by both conscious and unconscious,
embodying the striving of the unconscious for light and

the striving of the conscious for substance' (Jung 1916:
168).
Chorodow (1997: 10) identifies two stages in the

development of an active imagination: 'First letting the
unconscious come up and second, coming to terms with
the unconscious... it is a natural sequence that might go on
over many years.' The first step simply consists of letting

things happen, a sort of meditative daydream in which
material is allowed to emerge and can be consciously
observed. 'At first the unconscious takes the lead while

the conscious ego serves as a kind of attentive inner
witness.' Then, 'in the second part of active imagination
consciousness takes the lead. As the affects and images of
the unconscious flow into awareness, the ego enters
actively into the experience. This part might begin with a
spontaneous string of insights; the larger task of
evaluation and integration remains. Insight must be
converted into an ethical obligation—to live it in
life' (ibid.).
The active imagination thus involves fantasy activity

that includes the participation of the conscious ego. The
ego can thereby enter into remembered communication
with the contents of the unconscious and become an
active player in the narrative as it develops. The psyche is
here seen as being an autonomous realm with which the
ego cooperates, rather than territory that must be
conquered. The focus shifts from the sovereignty of the
ego to a development of inner relationships. And the
response to an emerging subjectivity of mature adulthood
is to make available the tools of self-exploration to older
adults.
Weaver (1973 links active imagination to the

development of a 'personal myth' around which inner and
outer realities can be restructured. However, according to
the Jungian tradition, one can be seduced by personal
myth so that the myth takes over and is living you rather
than you it. Active imagination allows a dialogue to take
place between the self and these mythic images, which, in
the mind's eye, can take human form. It 'makes it possible

to have a discussion with them without the ego being
swamped by them in a way in which they are
indistinguishable from one's thoughts and moods'

(Weaver 1973: 7). Indeed, an active imagination would
seem to suggest two forms of consciousness, which in
another setting have been examined by Brennan (1997).

The first form of consciousness consists of the
instrumental awareness associated with the
psychoanalytic ego, 'a repository of received views,

planning in advance and one form of intentionality'
(Brennan 1997: 91-2). However, Brennan also
hypothesizes a second form, a 'life-force' which is mindful
rather than driven and a source of intuitive creativity.

This second form exists beyond language and beneath
everyday activity, and involves a suspension of the ego-
control which 'coincides with rejuvenation'.
The autonomy attributed to fantasy activity in
analytical psychology, that it is literally seen to have a life
of its own, also has a bearing on the representation of
age-based identities within the psyche. Rather than being

interpreted primarily in terms of transference
relationships, here associations and fantasy figures
become archetypal figures that contain special (yet also

universal) properties. They become messengers from the
unconscious. The developmental characteristics of these
archetypal figures has been elaborated elsewhere (Biggs

1989,1993a), and of particular interest to the study of
mature identity formation are the wise old woman

(Weaver 1973) and man (Middelcoop 1985). While 'wise
elders' inevitably come to reflect cultural stereotypes in
some of their attributes, their main function in the adult
psyche is liminal. That is to say, they are gatekeepers who
indicate an alternative state of being, partly by their

reminding presence as persons in later life, and partly as
a guide to a state of affairs that the active subject has not
experienced to date. Resistance to the influence of wise
elders would be a response to their role as harbingers of
personal change as much as it is to the properties of old
age itself. By nurturing skills of active imagination, the
possibility emerges of entering into dialogue with elders
who inhabit one's inner world, or indeed an internal
dialogue between different age-specific representations

of the self. The bearing this has on intergenerational
communication is twofold. First, Samuels (1985) has
argued that all archetypal figures are filled out by

reference to culture and personal experience, which
suggests that an increased dialogue may influence
relations in external 'reality'. Second, Hillman (1970) has

developed an archetypal psychology in which responses
to external objects (which include people) are mediated

by the internal archetypal matrix of images. In other
words, one would respond to an older person, child,
woman, man as a reflection of these internal characters as
well as individuals with their own personal identities.
Both of these positions would indicate a close

relationship between the character of images from the
imagination and relations between individuals and
groups in the external, social world. Modifications in the

psychological arena would have a reciprocal effect on
actual relations between generations.
Drawing on Jungian ideas, Tomstam (1996) has
identified the psychology of later life as concerning the
task of 'gerotranscendence'. This, he proposes, can be
qualitatively distinguished from Erikson's 'ego-integrity'

and forms of disengagement in that it includes elements
of both. 'A high degree of gerotranscendence is related to
higher degrees of both social activity and life satisfaction

simultaneously as the degree of social activity becomes
less important in attaining satisfaction' (Tomstam 1996:
38). Later life, can, according to this perspective, be

connected with both social activity and solitary
'philosophizing'. Tomstam (1994) collected experiences
of Swedish (52-97 years) and Danish (74-100) older

adults, and indicates that while external losses increase in
later life, there is an absence of reported loneliness. He
suggests that adults approach identity 'more like a
Buddhist' as they age, which he interprets as an intrinsic

drive towards transcendence marked by 'positive
solitude' and an increased broad-mindedness. This is
complemented by an enhanced awareness of the
difference between self and role, in the sense of
distinguishing between the development of what is
unique about the self rather than conforming to an
appropriate social niche. Such processes are connected to
more active and complex coping patterns in social
situations. Schroots (1996) notes that gerotranscendence

refers to active multi-coping strategies rather than the
defensiveness and social breakdown implied by
disengagement. These elaborations of Jungian themes

highlight the creativity and flexibility that can occur as a
correlate of increased inner-directedness in later life.
The Jungian inheritance
Jung leaves us with an understanding of the
subjectivity of mature adulthood that is very different

from both psychoanalysis and ego psychology. In many
respects it is as if other orthodoxies have been stood on

their heads. Rather than seeing mature adulthood as a
period in which self-exploration becomes increasingly
difficult, analytical psychology makes a virtue out of
individuation. The mature imagination is described as
consisting of increased insight and inner-directedness.

This is no period of vicarious existence, but one in which
the mature adult is seen as having a duty to attend to the
self; indeed, interpersonal relations are rarely touched on.
By comparison with the Eriksonian life cycle, the Jungian
model results in a critical stance towards social mores.

The first half of life is thought to lead to a diminution of
the personality precisely because of younger adult
concerns about achievement within an established social

order. From a Jungian standpoint, ego psychology appears
to consist of a 'history of social personas', persona being
theorized as a superficial and essentially dysfunctional

means of social adaptation. It is partly this cynicism
concerning social influences on the psyche, and a

tendency to introversion in the personality of Jung
himself, that leads to the positioning of later life as a
period of personal growth involving a considerable
amount of inward attention.
As the second half of life is thought of as being quite

different from the first in terms of existential priorities,
an examination of the subjectivity of this second phase is
sharply differentiated from childhood. Childhood is
viewed neither as a source of adult problems nor as a

formative and central focus of the lifecourse as a whole.
Indeed, it is hardly mentioned, except as a repository of
issues that need to be cleared up before the real business
of adult development can get under way.
It is also apparent that the properties that this model
associates with midlife and old age are seen as part of a

natural maturational process which can be enhanced by
therapeutic intervention, but is by no means dependent
upon it. The non-directive application of active
imagination allows a diversity of experience to be

recognized and given voice in mature adulthood. While
King (1973) has contributed to the understanding of
transference phenomena in later life, analytical

psychology has expanded our understanding of how
figures from the inner world represent age and ageing.
Both these trends, one emphasizing interpersonal
perception and the other intrapersonal symbolization,

contribute to the disaggregation of chronology and social
norms from the the inner experience of age. Ageing
emerges as a process of increasing multiplicity and
dialogue, which, perhaps paradoxically, engenders an

increasingly intact and rounded sense of self.
Mature adulthood is thus seen as being a time of
natural expansion for the self, in contrast to the
constraining presence of social expectation. This arguably
results in an overly optimistic conceptualization of later

life, which pays insufficient attention to the effects of
bodily ageing or structured inequalities within an ageing
population. However, the advantages of this perspective,

both as a personal narrative and as a cultural
understanding of later life, are considerable. The story,
from midlife onwards, includes the possibility of personal

development that is unique to this life phase, and invites
caution as to the advisability of plotting a course based on
priorities from other parts of the lifecourse.
3
Postmodern ageing
MODERNITY AND POSTMODERNITY
In addition to the psychodynamic debate on ageing
identity, there has also been a growing acknowledgement
that the social circumstances in which identities are

played out may be shifting dramatically. Attention has
shifted towards the surface manifestations of identity

rather than deeper structuration. These changes have
been characterized as a movement away from conditions
of modernity to something else, which has been called

variously late capitalism (Jameson 1984), high modernity
(Giddens 1991) or postmodernity (Featherstone 1991).
Whereas the guiding principles of modernity could be
thought of as a belief in linear progress, technical
expertise and universal explanations of human behaviour,

these new developments are marked by a suspicion that
progress from one perspective might mean calamity from
another, an awareness of diversity that verges on
fragmentation and a sense that riskiness and uncertainty
pervade social life.
This state of affairs might be more realistically
thought of as an intensification of processes that have

been developing since the Western Enlightenment and
the growth of industrial societies worldwide. It has been
argued that as the world moves faster and faster, and gets
increasingly complex, so the roots of personal identity
become stressed and insecure. These circumstances
necessitate strategies which are adapted to change, one

aspect of which is a movement of interest away from
static content to the importance of process in the

maintenance of an adult identity. Not so much what
individuals think they are, then, as how they keep that

idea of themselves going. Models of ageing and of
personal change which have emphasized defined age

characteristics may now be seen as attempts to stabilize
ageing identities against an increasingly chaotic
background.
Indeed, some writers consider that change and the
impact of consumer culture are sufficiently intense to
dislocate behaviours and attributes from their established
meanings altogether. In the centrifuge of contemporary

society, it is proposed that identities become detached
and recombined in ways that may have no relation to
their original meaning and context. Whereas modernist

thinking has tended to emphasize the threats that rapid
social change holds for personal identity, postmodernism
evidences a tendency towards a celebration of the

multiplicity and recombinations that can result. Qualities
that have traditionally been associated with age, for
example, would no longer be fixed, and older adults may

be able to create new forms of self-presentation (Gilleard
1996). The promise, as far as ageing and identity are
concerned, is that one might somehow choose not to
become old.
MODERNITY AND UNCERTAINTY
The contradictory nature of modern existence is still

best summed up by Marx and Engel's (1888) observation
that contemporary society cannot survive without
constantly revolutionizing its productive base, on which
human relationships depend. This process is experienced
as one in which 'All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their
train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions

are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated
before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all
that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to

face with sober senses, his real conditions of life' (Marx
and Engels 1888: 83).
This quote eloquently conveys the tremendous

energy within modern society and suggests a number of
core points about the modern human condition. First, the
self is surrounded by constant change, brought about by

competition to make ever cheaper and more effective
goods. Second, the most important, and defining, scenario
for identity is that of work, as a relationship of production
in which value is conferred and change made possible. It

is, in other words, one's position in relation to production
that defines identity and social consciousness. Further,
pre-existing anchors for identity are fast being eroded,
which will eventually confront human beings with the

underlying dynamic that structures their relationships
one to another other. For Marx, these hidden relations
were based on class antagonism and it was a class
identity, an identity based on economics, that was

constantly being obscured. Because the system was in a
continual state of flux, however, attempts would be made
by powerful groups to fix social relations and how these

relationships were seen. Dominant and progressive
groups would contest this territory, and eventually this
form of progress would give birth to a future in which

contemporary contradictions are resolved.
Late life, as political economists such as Estes (1979),
Townsend (1986), Walker (1986) and Phillipson and

Walker (1986) have observed, does not fare well under
this regime. Adult ageing is increasingly marginalized
with regard to work. The spaces made available,
especially to older adults, are structured in terms of

dependency, and they are commonly perceived as a
burden on more productive parts of society. Rather than
their life experience being valued, it is construed as
obsolescent in the headlong rush towards a better future.
Age, ageing, maturity and late life are all identities
that are affected by these conditions and by the remedies
that are made available. These are effects that go further
than the traditional image of older people failing to keep

up with dizzying change. There are biases at a more
abstract level, including the privileging of the future over
the past and the importance of work as an organizing

principle which is itself age-stratified, working to place
mature adulthood at a disadvantage. However, there are
also trends, suggested by Giddens (1991) among others,

that point to certain advantages over the negative
attribution of age. If identities can indeed be recreated
without significant reference to where they have

traditionally been embedded, might this not also open up
the possibility of mature identities disconnected from
stereotyping and over-determination?
Psychologically speaking, modernity is both

frightening and exciting. It is a setting in which, according
to Frosh (1991: 11-12), 'human relationships are
possible, but are always being undercut and destroyed.
An environment in which personal integrity means

something as a potentiality, but is always in danger of
being fragmented by forces beyond our control.' One
must sift through the contradictory experiences of
modern life to find an enduring sense of self. Once

discovered, the self is always in danger of erosion and in
need of regeneration. What distinguishes modern
consciousness from that of other eras is an unsettling

demand that it takes both itself and the period in which it
exists as an object of constant interrogation and renewal
(Venn 1997). Modernity is characterized, then, as both

undercutting the status quo and a source of increasing
interconnection, which Giddens (1991) identifies with a

progressive disembedding from traditional structures
that might contextualize and structure the lifecourse.
Accordingly, social relations are freed from the hold of
specific positions, such as age-stages, and can
simultaneously be recombined 'across wide time-space

distances'. Castoriades (1997) has suggested that
contemporary capitalism holds out the promise of
creative autonomy, plus the threat of external control,

and this contradiction goes some way to describe the
shape identity takes under modern conditions. It

produces certainty, in particular and restricted forms,
plus the threat of vertiginal uncertainty. Modernity can,
then, be seen as giving rise to a narrative of a core self,
beset by difficulties and assaults to its integrity, that is
kept stable over time. The past is a critical reference point

in the search for a better future state. In order to maintain
its integrity, the self must divine strategies that
accommodate a continual state of becoming. Identity, just

like the forces of production, is in need of continuous
servicing, in order to maintain a balance between
determinacy and indeterminacy and ensure its survival.
This description of the modern self speaks a language
that is recognizable to the psychodynamic project. They
are related enterprises that emphasize progress, the
hidden nature of truth and the importance of creating an

authentic narrative. The psychotherapies protect identity
against being crushed by this juggernaut, and teach us
how to make the most of what personal indeterminacy

can be found. A belief in the possibility of self-
development is thereby sustained, even in the face of the
brutalities of modernization. Psychotherapy constitutes a
search for continuity in an unstable and uncertain world,
so that we can, in Berman's (1982) phrase, keep on
keeping on. Psychoanalysis is modern in the sense that it
is committed to the uncovering of 'deep' structures that

will increase the circumference of personal control,
contained within a meta-narrative that explains the
superiority of the present over the past. This is embodied

in the struggle to make sense of and overcome irrational
psychological drives, and also in the suggestion that social
cohesion is achieved at considerable psychic cost and

suffering. The relationship between the person and
society is therefore problematic.
THE POSTMODERNIZATION OF PSYCHOTHERAPY
Multiplying ageing identity
The psychotherapies form an important source of

information about legitimized characteristics of the
maturing adult. They also tell us something about the
process of identity management, the techniques used to
maintain and repair the self, over and above the

attributes that any identity might contain. Changes in
technique are also part and parcel of new understandings

of how the self can be sustained in everyday life. The
tactics and strategies we use to keep our identities going
on a daily basis will tend both to reflect the technologies
of contemporary psychotherapy and to influence them as

part of a rich, but often tacit, cultural dialogue on adult
identity.
Frosh (1991) points out that while Freud's patients

were suffering from too much repression, they were not
mad. Rather, in the restrictive circumstances of turn-of-
the-century Vienna, 'their toleration of the demands of

society required renunciation of certain inner demands...
Which if acted on would lead to the devastation of their
social relationships' (Frosh 1991: 34). Freud's great

invention was to find a way to recalibrate their psychic
processes and, in so doing, to render them more able in
the struggle to maintain order in the face of internal
chaos. So, while psychoanalysis radically destabilized

thinking on the human condition, its goal was to integrate
individuals back into society. 'I offer you no consolation/
says Freud at the beginning of Civilization and Its
Discontents (1930). There is no escape from the filling out

of a social blueprint because the alternative would be the
chaotic, the irrational and the destructive in the human
soul. Society precludes the possibility of acting out erotic
and murderous impulses, and in so doing ensures the

survival of the species. The task of adulthood consists,
according to this perspective, of a struggle to achieve and
maintain a 'working' identity. Not anarchic pleasure and

anger, but 'ordinary unhappiness' becomes the order of
the adult day.
Erikson's and Jung's theories of adult psychology can

be seen, in retrospect, as different instances of closure
around this central issue. While Jung saw psychoanalysis
as contributing to an overbearing social control, the

direction taken by Erikson reflects the view that such
theorizing insufficiently connected the self to society.
They therefore draw the line around identity and its
containing structure in different places. The Eriksonian

approach emphasizes balance between different stages
the adult passes through towards personal coherence and
continuity. There is a preoccupation with binding the
sequential elements of the lifecourse together into a

meaningful whole. This element of coherence is provided
by embedding identity firmly into social structuration,
with a clear goal in generativity. Within this model,
threats to the self emerge through the unsuccessful

negotiation of stability which would otherwise form the
basis for the next stage of development. It consists of a
domestication of psychoanalysis in which the

unconscious hardly makes an appearance, except as a
'striving for continuity of personal character' or 'the silent
doings of ego-synthesis'. It is an attempt to fix ageing

identities in response to the challenge of modernity.
For Jung, adult coherence centred on a continuing
process of individuation. Social structuration, when not

seen as irrelevant, was seen as an impediment to the
elaboration of an increasing amount of personal material
that becomes consciously available. Rather than being
bound by 'false wrappings', an antidote to meaningless

existence is seen in an entry into dialogue with the
unconscious. This model thereby retains some of the
terror of unconscious forces and the creativity of the
irrational. The Jungian 'lifecourse' is not linear in the

sense that age-stages are; rather, it is liminal. Liminality
refers to a state of progressive transformation and
transition, and has its linguistic root in the concept of a
threshold. According to this perspective, the adult psyche

is opened to increasing indeterminacy as multiple options
present themselves for negotiation. The negotiating,
however, contributes to a strengthening of the core self,

the increasingly individuated negotiator.
Both, in their different ways, introduce an element of
play into the debate on the nature of self, identity and the
relationship between the parts and the whole. Separate
identities are peeled off from an undifferentiated core and
the relationship between age and identity is loosened.

Erikson's linear progression suggests that many different
parts of the self appear as one progresses through the
lifecourse. Thus a multiplicity of age-related identities
occurs over time. In analytic psychology's entry into

negotiation with the unconscious and the irrational, the
parts are organized coexistently and also have age-
specified characteristics. A multiplicity of identities is
therefore said to exist at the same time within the

individual psyche. However, a problem exists for both,
because there is a lack of fit between social expectation
and experience and, while the solutions suggested by ego
and analytical psychologies are radically different, they

hold in common the need to keep a core self together and
resist disintegration. Erikson and Jung thereby provide
different solutions to this abiding problem of the modern

adult self.
The modern (and modernist) problem of the ageing
self that emerges from these developments can be

described as follows. In maturity, the self has both more
options and more experience to draw on. It becomes
more whole. Whereas, in young adulthood, the life-force

acts as a source of driving energy, in mature adulthood it
emerges as an organizing principle. However, this
expansion of the self occurs within an increasingly hostile
and uncertain set of social circumstances. The question

arises whether it is possible for the mature adult to keep a
coherent core self together in these inhospitable
circumstances. Self-identity is both loosened up and
subject to restriction aimed at exercising some control

over the place of ageing individuals.
'Peeling off' and 'loosening up'
Two trends can be identified from an examination of
ageing and identity in this context. The first can be

described as a process of 'peeling off'. Peeling off refers to
a trend towards the uncoupling of qualities that were
previously thought to be integral, to be more or less the

same thing. Examples include: the separation of adult
ageing and increasing rigidity in the psyche, such that
perspectives on maturity include variety and the

expansion of previously underdeveloped aspects of the
self; distinguishing between chronological age and the
internal experience of self so that one's age no longer

leads to easy assumptions about how old one feels; and
distinguishing between social expectation and personal

development, so that certain age-stages are seen to
depend upon specific cultural contexts rather than being
a universal blueprint that discriminates between
successful and unsuccessful ageing.
Second, a process of 'loosening up' is suggested by
increased flexibility in the relationship between qualities

once they have been distinguished one from another.
Examples here would include the proposals that different
images of the ageing self exist within the psyche, and can
interact with each other or become dominant in

particular contexts but not others, or that internal
thoughts and feelings can be transferred on to others and
in some cases others identify with them. These processes

facilitate the adoption of different identities at different
times and in different places. Loosening up also refers to a
move towards non-directive approaches in counselling

and therapy, which encourage the exploration of personal
experience, rather than reducing it, through

interpretation, to meanings that fit a particular theory of
identity at any one point in the lifecourse.
Peeling off and loosening up have contributed to
thinking about the lifecourse as containing a variety of
shapes or textures. However, it would be wrong to

conclude that psychotherapy has rejected the idea that
there is a personality or life-force that lends experience
coherence and purpose. Rather, these trends contribute
to a view of adult ageing as both malleable and

maintaining the notion of a core sense of self (McAdams
1997). This self is the someone who is doing the shaping,
who performs an identity, and ensures that there is a
personal show that is on the road. The shift is qualitative

and is reflected in a change of focus from what is said to
how it is said, and how it informs what Rustin (1991) has
called the 'art of living'. In terms of therapeutic technique,

'practical interest has shifted from developmental history
towards the subtleties and ambiguities of the interactions
between patient and analyst, on both conscious and

unconscious levels' (Rustin 1991:123). The implications
of this change of emphasis for mature adulthood are

considerable. In developmental terms, it constitutes a
move away from formative events—that this happened in
your childhood and caused this to occur now—to a
concentration on style and the patterning of
contemporary behaviour. The degree to which

interpretation is unpeeled from its reliance on early
experience would affect the degree to which subjectivities
grounded in the experience of adulthood are allowed to

emerge. It leads to an interest in intergenerational
communication as it happens and the meanings that are

created as persons interact with one another. It is, then, a
move away from the importance of content and causality
to the importance of process and performance and a
move with implications for our understanding of
lifecourse events.
The influence of psychotherapy is much broader than
as a method of individual change: it shapes, and is shaped

by, broad notions of personal development in Western
societies. It contributes to a modern image of personal
identity in a continuous state of 'becoming' and gives it
direction. A focus on relationship, the here and now and

multiplicity emerge as key to contemporary
understandings of identity and change in this context.
They represent the form that loosening and peeling off
take within contemporary technologies of the self. Each

has implications for the positioning of mature adulthood
in terms of intergenerational relations, the value
attributed to the past and the options for identity that can
be legitimately developed.
Relationships
Frosh (1991: 44, 45) has argued that contemporary

society has moved 'From the problems of too much depth
to those of too much surface', and, in particular, that
people now express 'their worries less in terms of self
control and more in terms of their inability to form

satisfying relationships with others.' This is reflected in a
change of emphasis in therapy, from cure through the
discovery and exorcizing of past events, to an

examination of the dynamic existing between
contemporary couples, groups and individuals. The
therapist ceases to act as an arbiter of reality because

meaning is increasingly understood to be mutually
constructed between participants. Stress is placed on the
importance of the other as the medium through which the

self is experienced and from which feedback is obtained.
In terms of technique, the problem for psychotherapy
becomes the maintenance of emotional connectedness
and therefore, as Rubin (1997: 8) puts it, 'interpretations

are tentative, subject to revision with the patient as a
partner in their construction.' The analytic task 'is not to
discover psychic reality, but to create it'.
A focus on the processes of human relationships

increases the use of therapeutic ideas as a guide to
everyday, reflexive, living. Giddens (1991: 5), for example,
has argued that identities now depend on 'the sustaining
of coherent, yet continuously revised, biographical

narratives, [that] takes place in the context of multiple
choice ... Reflexively organised life planning, which
normally presumes consideration of risks as filtered

through contact with expert knowledge, becomes a
central feature of the structuring of self-identity.' In other
words, the maintenance of a coherent story about the self

is no longer a matter of occasional fixing if something
goes wrong, but is a continuing process in need of

continual 'reskilling'. This is deemed necessary in order to
weather transitions that are part and parcel of everyday
life. In a similar vein, Kivnick (1993: 23) comments that
'The notion of old age as a time to sit back and reap the
psychosocial fruits of earlier efforts must yield to a more

realistic view of ongoing, always dynamic re-involvement,
reviewing, renewing, reworking.' She reinforces the
perception of late life identity as the subject of constant

revision and change. However, as part of this
incorporation of 'therapy' into the everyday, relationships

become increasingly self-contained. Giddens (1991: 6)
refers to this as the development of 'pure relationships',
'in which external criteria have become dissolved: the
relationship exists solely for whatever rewards the
relationship as such can deliver', and trust 'can no longer

be anchored in criteria outside the relationship itself.'
Thus, while relationships have come into primary

focus, they have also become inward looking, protected
from outside frameworks, and take on a life of their own.
What goes on within them has, according to this view,
become more contingent and less dependent on a single

correct notion of conduct, including conduct related to
age.
Here and now
A move towards relationship has been paralleled by
an increased interest in language and dialogue. This has

led commentators such as Parker (1996: 447) to suggest
that ‘psychic processes [have] become located in
discourse rather than the self-enclosed interior of
individual minds.’ The value of this observation stems

from an emphasis placed on dialogue itself rather than
what it denotes about a personal past. It has, in other
words, released identity from history.
The roots of this shift can be seen in an increased

importance given to transference phenomena.
Transference allows the therapist to concentrate on the
thoughts and feelings that he or she experiences while in
the presence of the patient as an important source of

information about the patient's own emotional state.
Since transference, as a reflection of other relationships,
is thought to be enacted in the therapeutic setting, the

therapist can heighten the emotional power of an
interaction by interpreting the other relationships
directly as a part of what is happening between her and

the patient. Both of these trends shift the focus of the
psychodynamic enterprise away from past or hidden

events and towards tacit communications within speech
in the here and now. The qualities of relationships that

gain emphasis through this process include sustaining an
impression of a perpetual present. Parker (1996) points
out that contemporary therapy is now concerned with the
patterning of discourse and the 'carrying of patterns' in

the therapeutic session itself. There has been a change of
emphasis. The unconscious is now seen to shape
behaviour in the present, and it is possible to read and
interpret such patterning without moving beyond the

immediate experience of interaction.
This has the advantage of significantly diluting any

reduction of adult experience to the residues of childhood
contradictions and their attempted solution. And basing
adult identity formation in contemporary life contexts
provides a powerful set of tools for the discovery of an

adult subjectivity. However, there is also a difficulty in too
stringent a focus on here and now events, insofar as it is
unclear how continuity and past experience now find a

valued space within the new scheme of things. Bollas
(1989: 193), for example, observes that 'One of the
casualties of the present intense interest in the "here and
now" transference interpretation is the diminution of the

"there and then".'
The possibility opens for an extreme subjectivity in
which the past is simply seen as a metaphor for current

concerns and has no point of reference except whatever
existential preoccupations are uppermost at any one
point in time. 'Recollections' of the past not only serve the
selective aims of the present, but cease to have any
validity outside of that discourse. Bollas reminds us that

there was not only a 'real past' but also 'real memories' of
that past, and that it is unclear how a here and now
approach can distinguish these historical and personal

phenomena from their manipulation or from fantasies in
the service of the present. There is a difference, in other
words, between narrative and fiction. Privileging the here

and now has, in Bollas's (1989:194) opinion, led to the
neglect of 'the need to collect together the detail of a
patient's history and to link him to his past in a way that

is meaningful.'
When the past is recognized, it appears as source

material for current concerns. Thus, Giddens observes,
somewhat acerbically, that after divorce individuals are

encouraged to 'reach back into [their] early experience
and find other images and roots for independence, for
being able to live alone and for undertaking the second
chances provided' (Giddens 1991: 11). This process is

presented as 'the key to reclaiming oneself' by the
authors of a self-help manual and contributes to
Giddens's theme of identity as increasingly self-
referential. It is also important to note that this

conception creates a strikingly different relationship with
the past from that contained in psychoanalysis. History
does not determine the problem and entail freedom from

it, but can be used as a ragbag from which the material for
a new narrative, more fitting to current circumstances,
can be built. The past is not there to be understood, but

raw material for immediate concerns.
This argument draws attention to the way that the
'truth' of identity is problematized by this debate. While it

is probably the case that we will never be able to know
what actually happened to the self or another person, it is
a radical departure to assume that all memories simply
reflect current story-telling. Rather, memories, as well as

being reconstructed, were laid down in particular
circumstances and hold those contemporary feelings,
interpretations and associations within them. They store,
in other words, people's experience of being themselves

at that time in their world and it may be valid to retain the
authenticity of those original recollections. An emphasis
on the here and now, however, only succeeds in including
past memory in the service of the present.
Multiplicity and the blurring of boundaries
A third trend in contemporary psychotherapy
concerns the possibility that, rather than focusing on the

construction of a single personal identity, the psyche
includes a variety or multiplicity of options. Elements of
this trend can be seen in King's (1980) proposals on

transference, Erikson's (1982) sequentially organized life
stages and Jung's (1933b) age-related archetypal figures.
This loosening of identity has been extended by some
writers to suggest that these multiple identities are not

simply available, at the same time, in the here and now,
but that they should each be credited equal validity.
Krippner and Winkler (1995: 277-8), proponents of what
has been called consciousness studies, have claimed that

a fundamental shift in perspective has occurred 'from one
that recognises the value of only a single "normal" state of
consciousness to one that values multiple states; from one
that sees human development as having a ceiling to one
that views such limitations as culturally determined.'
According to this position, people can shift from one
identity to another, and each of these 'subpersonalities,

personal myths, local truths and individual realities'
should be seen as equally important.
This disaggregation of the self into many parts also

extends to an examination of the connections between
individuals, as can be seen in debates over the role of
defence mechanisms. The psychodynamic understanding

of these mechanisms, including the projection of
unpleasant or unwanted thoughts and attributes on to
others and projective identification whereby unwanted

material from one person is unconsciously accepted by
another, suggest an erosion of the boundaries between
self and others. Attributes of the personality are spread
around by such mechanisms, they appear to exist

between people and are maintained by them in ways
which render the idea of a psychologically self-contained
individual less persuasive. Hinshelwood (1996: 185)
suggests, for example, that psychodynamic phenomena

such as splitting, projection and introjection, transference
and countertransference 'may involve a diffusion of the
personality' whereby 'a particular emotion or cognition,
sometimes even a mental capacity or function—may

become relocated, at least for a while, in the other.'
Accordingly, personal identity may not be as stable

and well bounded as has commonly been assumed.
Selfhood becomes a horizon, rather than a fixed state,
which operates across individual boundaries as well as
producing multiple identities. Indeed, under such

conditions it becomes increasingly difficult to find a
vocabulary that expresses this multiplicity and blurring of
boundaries yet maintains the integrity of a core self at all.
Banks (1996) has explored the later life of Virginia
Woolf as an example of the inability to achieve Eriksonian
integrity under conditions similar to those described

above. 'For Woolf, the self is not like a nugget with hard
and fast boundaries, but rather, like a cloud with multiple

forms, changing components and permeable edges….
When you met Virginia Woolf on Tuesday you did not see
the same woman you had met on Monday' (Banks 1996:
26). She performed selves depending upon whom she was
with. So when she reached an age 'when some friends die
and others drift away into their own pressing concerns'
(Banks 1996: 28), she was left without reliable props with
which to maintain such a diffuse patterning of identity.
She could not, in other words, reimagine herself as an
older woman. Banks proposes that an experience of self

as transient and in pieces made it very difficult to come to
terms with an integral sense of self, necessary to
encounter the challenges and, for Woolf, despair of old

age. This description of the experiences that led to
Woolf's suicide indicates dangers inherent in multiplicity
which lacks props or structures through which an

authentic ageing identity can be invented.
In response to these challenges to the task of

maintaining an integral self, a psychodynamic
understanding would lead one to negotiate chaotic

internal and external states, to make sense of them and
thereby disarm them. The question would still seem to be
how far persons can maintain their selfhood and agency
in the face of an increasingly fragmented social world.

This point is put rather well by Radden (1996), a social
philosopher who, while not working in the
psychodynamic tradition, recognizes both the
bewildering diversity of everyday life and the possibility

of personal continuity. She states that 'Whatever
approach we adopt in our explanation of divided minds
and successive selves, we must acknowledge these

unremarkable heterogeneities. Ordinary selves are at best
only relatively continuous through time, and at any
particular time their unity or oneness is not simple'

(Radden 1996:23). These 'unremarkable heterogeneities
of a singular self', she argues, should be treated as a given

and a touchstone for contemporary debates on self-
identity; and not, by implication, as threatening the
existence of an everyday working sense of wholeness.
Rather, they indicate a strategy for keeping the self afloat
in response to a changing world. Identities can peel off

one from another and loosen their relationship to a single
ordering narrative without losing personal coherence.
CONSUMERISM AND POSTMODERN AGEING
The peeling off and loosening up of the meaning of
mature identity, most notable in trends towards
relationship, the here and now and multiplicity, resonates
with a broader movement from fixity to flexibility and the
idea that identities can be consumed one after another as

well as produced by a determining social structure.
If modernist perspectives on the self have tended to

rely on production as an organizing principle,
contemporary thinking has increasingly looked to
patterns of consumption as a basis for diversity and
choice in the management of identity. A threat of personal

fragmentation is thereby changed into a promise of
multiple identity and matching lifestyles. Consumption
has increasingly been used as a metaphor for the process

of identity maintenance. As part of this process, trends
towards 'more surface', such as the loosening of meanings
that were previously thought of as fixed and a focus on
immediate experience, have led to a rejection of

explanations based on depth and time.
Many claims have been made for consumer culture as
a phenomenon that marks the management of

contemporary identity out from that of preceding
historical periods. Crook et al. (1992) note, for example,
'the spread of the commodity form into all spheres of life'
and point out that the consumption of goods and services
has replaced Marx's focus on a relation to production as

the principle on which identities are built. And 'at the
leading edge of consumerism is a market for ideas about
identity offering choice about who one is or might be'

(Baddeley 1995: 1075).
So, rather than consumerism being seen as a source of
inauthenticity through the manufacture of 'false' needs

(Marcuse 1964) and the consumption of ever novel goods
as a substitute for genuine self-development (Giddens
1991), it is presented as the raw material of creative

identity building. Developments in the mass media and
advertising (Williamson 1978; Lury 1996) mediate this

process through attempts to make things desirable by
association with status, pleasure and lifestyle. This occurs

to such an extent, as meanings are grafted on to products
that are not intrinsic to them and symbolize attributes
beyond their practical function, that symbolic meanings
and practical meanings get thoroughly confused. It is then

but a short step to begin to detach and recombine
meanings in new ways without reference to their original
significance. This has led to the proposition that any
number of 'floating signifiers' can be used to build an

identity, any one of which may be valid under particular
conditions. Observation of this position can lead to
hyperbolic claims. Featherstone (1983, 1991), for

example, notes that an emphasis on lifestyle and
consumer culture has led to 'a profusion of information
and a proliferation of images which cannot be ultimately

stabilised, or hierachised into a system which correlates
to fixed social divisions ... [and] would further suggest the

irrelevance of social divisions and ultimately the end of
the social as a significant reference point' (Featherstone
1991: 83). A clear implication of this position would be
that, given access to consumer culture, social actors can
adopt any number of identities that may no longer be

directly connected to their material life circumstances.
Notions of authenticity and inauthenticity then become
meaningless, as any one presentation of self, with the

right props, becomes as valid as any other.
Theorizing of this sort can lead from a more
restrained view that consumerism provides the resources
from which to fashion identity statements, to a strong
hypothesis that the notion of a core self is no longer

useful in understanding contemporary identity. Selfhood
becomes the sum of an arbitrary collection of constructed
identities. Munro (1996) suggests that the consumption

of identities holds within it a new model for producing
the self. Consumer durables become the materials with
which the individual creates a 'complex process of

prosthesis', a 'labour of self', used to make individuals
visible to each other. Munro argues that one cannot,

however, see this simply as an extension of a core
identity, in other words, as the use of props to decorate
something that is itself stable and unchanging. Identity is
changed by the process of consumption and therefore is
not what it was.
A radical deconstruction of the self is most closely

associated with the work of Jean Baudrillard (1990).
Extending the argument that contemporary society
produces such a density of symbols and meanings that

they have become detached from their original locations
and take on a life of their own, Baudrillard goes on to
argue that an important consequence of this is a quality of
reversibility. Thus, one can collect, by moving forwards

and backwards across lifestyles that were previously
temporally located, symbols and meanings from which to
create an identity. Identity is no longer contingent on the

organizing principle of the lifecourse. Identities may be
adopted and discarded over time, not as a consequence of
any sense of progression or development, but at the

caprice of the wearer. One can, at least in theory, hit the
fast-forward and rewind buttons of life in order to cast

the ageing process into oblivion.
Writers such as Featherstone and Hepworth (1989)

have made considerable use of this and similar analyses
to gain an understanding of postmodern ageing. They
note that postmodern change has led to a 'blurring of

what appeared previously to be relatively clearly marked
stages and the experiences and characteristic behaviour
which were associated with those stages' (Featherstone
and Hepworth 1989:144). These trends include a focus on

the fluidity of social images and expectations with respect
to an ageing identity. Key to these new imaginal
possibilities would be the relationship between body and
identity and, most notably, a rejection of deterministic

narratives in favour of the elder as a consumer of more
youthful lifestyle choices. However, reversibility also
condemns human development, as an anthropologist, Lee

(1998), points out, to a hinterland of 'betwixt and
between periods' typical of rites of passage in traditional
societies, and in which the normal rules of social

organization are suspended. These periods of
indeterminate identity have been translated, by

Baudrillard, into a continuous state of affairs. Transition,
in other words, is a trip from which Baudrillard fails to
come down. A lifecourse is presented which can offer no
sense of purpose or direction other than as a continuing
round of interchangeability that only death can stop

(Baudrillard 1993).
Faced with such possibilities, Bauman (1995: 81)
suggests that the questions asked of identity development
also change. 'If the modern "problem of identity" was how

to construct an identity and keep it solid and stable', he
claims, 'the postmodern "problem of identity" is primarily
how to avoid fixation and keep the options open. In the
case of identity as in other cases, the catchword for

modernity was "creation"; the catchword of
postmodernity is "recycling".' Reading Bauman, it appears
that rather than trying to hold something of the lifecourse

solid and continuous, strategies for identity consist of a
persistent desire to escape that responsibility. Life is best
kept fragmentary and episodic, because a life lived as a

succession of episodes is freed from the worry about
consequences.
Episodic encounters are enacted 'as if they had no

past history and no future; whatever there is to the
encounter, tends to be begotten and exhausted in the
span of the encounter itself' (Bauman 1995: 49). The
personal lifecourse is played, according to this

perspective, with the intention of inconsequentiality, so
that the past cannot come to haunt the players and life is
experienced in a continuous present. Under these
conditions, Bauman argues that previous life strategies no

longer hold. There is little point in building for the future
if there is no guarantee that what is valued today will be
seen the same way tomorrow. Rather, people attempt to
protect themselves through the creation of an as-if world,

likened to the tourist who 'everywhere he goes he is in,
but nowhere of the place', and cannot be touched by what
goes on there. In this world, ageing becomes an

experience of observing the exotic and grotesque while
'keeping hope alive by the expedient of indefinite
postponement' (Bauman 1995: 49).
The conception of identity emerging from
consumerism and its corollaries in episodic and
reversible self-presentation has had particular

implications for the lifecourse. Kumar (1995) has
suggested, for example, that self and personal identity
have now to be conceived as spatial rather than historical
entities, with the consequence that there is now no

expectation of continuous lifelong development, and no
story of personal growth over time. If personal biography
becomes a matter of discontinuous experiences and
identities, there is no need for the narrative of a

developing personality. There are stories of the self in this
model, but they function to lend plausablility to
whichever identity is currently being performed. Their
purpose is short-term, and is supplied, in Giddens's

(1991) phrase, simply to 'keep a particular narrative
going'. This process applies as much to the future as it
does to the past, as one's plans, as well as one's past story,

contribute to the convincingness of the current episode.
To keep a current narrative going over time denies the
effects of time itself. The story is made up and contingent

upon an experience of a continuous present tense. It must
contain processes that allow the weathering of current

transitions, riding them out, surfing their waves; and, in
this, continuity over time has been replaced by the feeling
of continuousness. In such ways, it is suggested, consumer
culture supplies the props and the environment, allowing
the construction of an eternal present with no centre,

origin or destination.
A quite novel perspective on the lifecourse, and thus
adult identity, appears to emerge from this analysis. For,
rather than there being the maintenance of a continuous

and historically embedded core to the personality, it is
suggested that the concerns traditionally associated with
an ageing identity can be avoided. Further, this is no
longer an argument over the eclipsing of ageing and its

discontent through a consumer culture preoccupied with
youth. It is suggested instead that ageing can effectively
be abolished. This is achieved through entry into a series

of episodes, buoyed up by the consumption of
appropriate props, thus allowing the deployment of a
variety of identities.
HITTING THE BUFFERS
It would seem that a fundamental shift is being
suggested in the debate on ageing and identity. It takes
the form of a move away from an examination of threats

to the self occasioned by changes in age status. Instead,
ageing increasingly becomes a matter of consumer choice
and contingent identities, which might be repeatedly
recycled and thereby ensure continued social inclusion.

This restatement of the problem would also question the
continued relevance of signs of ageing in positioning older
people in society, as signs may no longer signify anything
greater than what social actors want them to. To search
for genuineness in age-related identities might become
meaningless if each identity becomes as synthetic as its
neighbour.
Even the body, which Butler (1987) suggested was an
undeniable sign of age, thus giving permission to ageist

attitudes, is malleable under postmodern conditions. Falk
(1995), for example, proposes that the body now takes on
the role of a surface which can be 'intentionally
elaborated', raw material that can be worked on. In later

life, Featherstone and Wemick (1995: 3) suggest, it is now
possible to 'recode the body itself' as biomedical and
information technology make available 'The capacity to

alter not just the meaning, but the very material
infrastructure of the body. Bodies can be reshaped,
remade, fused with machines, empowered through
technological devices and extensions.'
A focus on a new and flexible interpretation of the

body becomes key to understanding both images of
ageing and identity management. It promises an escape

from deterministic and age-related limits similar to the
way that consumerism allows the mature adult to buy his
or her way out of age-stereotyping and, on first reading,
both factors appear to suggest an increase in the
possibilities for identity choice in later life. It is also here,
however, that the project of maintaining multiple options
for identity hits the buffers of ageing as a physical
process. For even though the postmodern 'self' is
characterized as being capable of infinite expression, the
ageing body needs to be progressively managed if this
possibility is not to be lost. Old age increases this
contradiction to a point at which participation in
consumer lifestyles is significantly compromised. As
ageing gathers pace, it is increasingly difficult to 'recycle'
the body and it becomes a cage, which both entraps and
denies access to that world of choice.
In terms of positioning the question of maturity, this

line of reasoning suggests that the core problem lies
between the maintenance of an ageing identity and an
individual's own body. Featherstone and Hepworth
(1990: 255) have suggested that one way of
understanding this process requires the perception of
bodily ageing as a mask 'which cannot be removed: any
connection they may have with the individual's personal
sense of identity is the result of the ways other people
react to changes in facial appearance and the social

categories they imply.' Thus, social actors discover
discontinuity between the mask of ageing, as found in an
increasingly unattractive and unresponsive body, and

their actual desires and sense of self (see Figure 3.1).
Figure 3.1 The ‘mask of ageing’.
Hepworth (1991: 93) positions this contradiction in

terms of inner youthfulness and bodily age: 'At the heart
of the difficulty of explaining what it's like to be old lies
the awareness of an experiential difference between the

physical processes of ageing, as reflected in outward
appearance, and the inner or subjective "real self" which

paradoxically remains young.' This relationship has been
described by Turner (1995) as a betrayal of the
youthfulness of an 'inner body', and, in order to re-
establish a link with consumerism and the choice of
identity that it implies, something has to be done about

the ageing body as that thing that 'conceals the enduring
and more youthful self' (Featherstone and Hepworth
1990).
The mask motif and the problem of ageing, then, are
couched in terms of an antagonism between the ageing
body and a youthful 'inner' self. The body, while it is

malleable, can still provide access to a variety of
consumer identities. However, as Biggs (1997c) notes, it
leads to an endgame in which older people are at war
with themselves, an internalized battle between the

psyche and the body in which the social aspects of an
ageing identity have been lost. Ageing has become a
nightmare stalking the postmodern consumer's utopia,

and reverses its libertarian possibilities. It produces a
contradiction between the fixedness of the body and the
fluidity of social images. It tells the tourist that it is rime
to go home and the Peter and Petra Pans that there may
be an unpalatable end to their story.
SUMMARY AND IMPLICATIONS
A considerable tension is emerging here between the

mature identity imagined by psychodynamic thinking and
ideas about consumer identities and the ageing self. While
moves towards understanding the importance of

relationships, the here and now and multiple identity
have moved psychotherapy on to similar ground to
postmodern thinking, its model is still closely identified

with the notion of a core self that needs nurturing and
maintenance across a variety of unstable settings. It also
appears that a relaxation of preoccupations with
childhood in psychotherapy has happened

simultaneously to the proposal of a youthful self trapped
within an ageing body. This constitutes a surprising
reversal of the tasks of mature identity, now seen through
the lens of postmodern consumer culture. On the one

hand it is assumed that an authentic adult identity can be
understood by concentrating on immediate experience;
on the other, that the immediate experience of ageing is
an impediment to the emergence of a genuine and
youthful identity. Instead of elders escaping the
contradictions of early experience, youthful identity has
re-emerged as a wistfully desired and immanently
threatened state.
Along the way, a lot of established markers have been
jettisoned. These include the eschewal of longitudinal

experience as a basis for identity. Adult identity has been
construed as a series of fragmented episodes, which by
their very disconnectedness protect the player from
unwelcome consequences. The personal past now

functions as a bin full of decontextualized source material,
from which the needs for current identities can be met.
The past has become a metaphor for the present, which
itself draws on rather than reflects a remembrance of a

personal history. Neither does it seem necessary to worry
about keeping the self intact. Multiple identities provide
an ultimate defence against the assaults of contemporary

ageing, as they allow the individual to move on, and keep
moving on if difficulties are faced. This appears to be a
complex world of successive identities, each as valid as its
predecessor. It is one in which concern for coherence and
an emphasis on consolidation evaporate, because
discontinuities between age and identities no longer
matter.
The postmodern is not a perspective that makes clear

distinctions between personal fantasy, intersubjective
constructions and historical and emotional memory. At a

personal level, it becomes increasingly difficult to
distinguish between wants and needs. It appears
unnecessary to distinguish the authentic from the
inauthentic. It throws into contention a need for rooted

coherence and is marked by superficial relations with
others. Authenticity is, however, important from a
psychodynamic perspective, both for a durable and
convincing sense of self, and as a criterion for experience

to be handed on to others who might learn lessons from
it. If neither of these criteria applies, reflection on the
significance of ageing and the role of intergenerational

communication becomes meaningless. The possibility of
learning from history and of intergenerational solidarity
is diminished.
Two versions of an ageing identity emerge from this
debate. A psychodynamic view might hold that, having
knocked away the established props for an embedded

identity, the mature imagination requires internal
coherence in order to negotiate an increasingly uncertain
world. The postmodern perspective embraces social

fragmentation as a source of newly made and unmade
identities. Consumer culture can furnish lifestyles and
adaptations to the ageing body to keep this chimeric

process alive. However, it has to reinvent a distinction
between the hidden and the apparent in order to explain
ageing away as the disguising of a youthful inner self.

Whereas the psychodynamic, and most notably Jungian,
model sees the inner life as the manifestation of mature
adulthood, the postmodern adult psyche is really an
indeterminately young and possibly ageless person trying

to get out. In answer to the question of how age should be
thought of, postmodernity at first denies its relevance,
then sees it as a threat to unlimited hedonism. The
subjectivity of mature adulthood is conceived of as
youthful potential trapped in an ageing container, and it is
therefore questionable whether experience intrinsic to

maturity is at all considered.
4
Masque and ageing
HIDDEN AND SURFACE
Consideration of the relationship between ageing and
identity has produced two antagonistic and possibly
incompatible demands. On the one hand, a need emerges

to protect the mature imagination from hostile and
fragmenting conceptions of the lifecourse. On the other, a

celebration of surface, consumerism and reversibility
invites the possibility of eliminating many of the
consequences of ageing altogether. The traditional

psychoanalytic solution to problems of identity has been
to quell, or attempt to quell, internal monsters through
re-experiencing events that gave them birth. The object
has been to reconcile base emotions to the civilizing force
of social cohesion. This task defines the nature and

purpose of the adult imagination. Ego psychology
extended this argument by focusing on the shaping of
consciousness through successive tasks of self-definition.
The outcome of this approach was further to embed the
process of ageing into a fixed set of social conditions.
Analytical psychology set a separate path, centred on
increasing inner coherence, thereby effecting a transition
from the priorities of younger adulthood to those of the

second half of life and discovering new existential goals in
maturity.
The debate over modernity and postmodern
conditions has drawn attention to three elements that
have been underplayed in this psychodynamic sketch of

the adult lifecourse. The first of these is that ageing takes
place in a potentially hostile environment which spans a

continuum. At one end, emphasis on production relegates
adults who are not in work and older people in particular

to a marginal position in society, while at the other a
focus on the role of consumption in maintaining identities

places adults in an antagonistic position towards their
ageing bodies. Under these circumstances, technologies of
self such as the psychotherapies can no longer sustain a

resort solely to conformity or its destructive status, once
these contradictions in the relationship between self-
development and the social constructions of adulthood
have been identified. Second, contemporary society is, in

its very composition, subject to radical and continuous
change. This has meant that the mature imagination
requires techniques that maintain some form of stable

selfhood through a paradoxical adoption of the processes
of continual becoming. Theories that have been used to
describe the adult lifecourse can now themselves be seen

as attempts to fix identity or embrace diversity in this
dizzying and fragmenting environment. Any settlement is

made contingent on the ability of identity to stay afloat in
this uncertain world. Third, resolutions to the 'problem of
ageing' that emerge through postmodernity, while
initially celebrating a diversity of surface identities,
episodes and lifestyles, have had to reinvent the division

between the hidden and the surface in adult psychology
to engage with the questions that ageing presents. Life
cannot simply be seen as consisting of surfaces and

impressions 'all the way down'. There is an inner self
which stubbornly re-emerges, either as younger or as

more developed than appearances would suggest, and
whose relationship to the consumption of 'identity
statements' is rendered problematic by age.
This reinvention of the hidden, required by the
particular challenges of later life, has resulted in

psychodynamic and postmodern perspectives becoming
increasingly interdependent if contemporary ageing is to

be understood. Without the grounding influence of
psychodynamic thinking, postmodern theorizing results
in trajectory without teleology. It has movement without
direction and makes a virtue out of disconnection. Age,

however, connects identity with finitude. The limited
span of life, a progressive need to manage the body and a
culture hostile to the mature imagination raise existential
questions that render revelling in consumption shallow

and without purpose. Without recognition of the
looseness of contents and the multiple options that exist
under postmodern conditions, psychodynamic thinking

succumbs to the dangers of ossification and a serious
misreading of the issues facing mature integrity.
CONTINUITY AND COHESION
These new conditions challenge the very language
used to articulate the ageing process. An example can be
seen in the notion of development itself. Development is
closely linked to ideas of progress across the lifecourse,

an idea that has now become contested territory.
Development suggests linear movement over time, a
progression based on increasing chronological age, from

which identity obtains some form of continuity. However,
a change of emphasis to the consumption of a multiplicity
of episodes, experienced as taking place in a continuous

present, leaves little space for the apprehension of this
type of continuity. Rather, if there is a debate beyond
shopping until dropping, a shift in attention is suggested

towards the nature and value of cohesion; whether, in
other words, the constructed identity holds together at
any one point in time. Continuity suggests form through
the apprehension of consistent patterning across the

lifecourse, and its opposite, discontinuity, registers
changes in direction but does not displace an underlying
acceptance of temporal progression. Cohesion, on the

other hand, privileges the association of qualities,
unpeeled and subject to recombination. These are

simultaneously available within time frames that fail to
register deep-seated yet slow-moving mutability.
One of the results of these conceptual changes in
emphasis, then, has been that coherence of identity is
increasingly seen as a matter of cohesion rather than

continuity. Traditional psychoanalysis has drawn heavily
on progression and repetition over time and thus the

framework of continuity, while attention to the here and
now brings with it a concern that aspects of the self are
sufficiently flexible but still make sense as a story about
the self. Personal coherence becomes an issue of whether

the 'glue' that holds personality together has become too
rigid or too flexible, rather than whether the timetable
makes sense.
Questions raised by these new conditions have
considerable importance for our understanding of age

and the challenges it presents. Is it important, for
example, to achieve coherence through continuity, and
should continuity be rooted in a 'real' past or simply serve

to fuel a particular narrative of a supposed past? Can a
sense of personal becoming be maintained in inhospitable
social circumstances, and if so how are the protective
spaces that allow this to happen to be maintained? These
spaces would be both psychological in nature, maintained
by strategies for identity management, and related to

material spaces, consisting of buildings, clothing,
lifestyles, available in the external world. Further, within
these questions lies the problem of whether, and how, a

more genuine, self-identified focus for consciousness is
hidden beyond appearances and the multiplicity inherent
in consumer culture.
APPEARANCE AND AUTHENTICITY
While the models of adult identity identified above
differ in the priority given to surface or depth, with

postmodern models of identity privileging the former and
psychodynamic models the latter, a tension between
appearance and authenticity is carried by both. In
Featherstone and Hepworth's (1991, 1995) proposal for a
'mask of ageing', it is the ageing body that masks the inner
and youthful self. This model suggests that continuity is

maintained by a youthful or timeless identity, while
discontinuity is experienced through the 'progressive
betrayals of the body' that have been associated with age.
In the case of the mask of ageing, a solution appears in the
use of various props and technological advances. These
would include the use of virtual reality, communication

on an anonymized (at least in terms of appearance)
Internet, the modification of the body itself through
prosthesis and cyborgic machine-body combinations

(Haraway 1991). The ageing body itself becomes masked
through a theoretical, and in some cases practical, return
to the delights of a particular form of techno-biological

consumerism. By contrast, psychological models based on
the idea that ageing takes the form of progressively

individuated maturation (Tomstam 1994, 1996; Biggs
1993a, 1997c) tend to place the ageing self behind a mask
rooted in social conformity. Continuity is more easily held
by the body as the physical centre of personal experience,
while the self is marked by transcendent change. In these

approaches, inspired in part by analytic psychology, it is
the self that experiences the discontinuity of the first and
second halves of life and expands as a result of new

challenges and new psychological contents becoming
available to consciousness. In Jung's own thinking,

however, the role of the social mask, or persona, was
significantly underdeveloped, the principle task of
therapy being to enhance the mature and active
imagination. The persona was assumed to fall away with
age. It was associated not with body at all, but with the
conceit of social position. Neither tradition has developed
a considered analysis of the strategies that mature adults
might adopt to negotiate a meaningful place in their social

worlds. Such strategies would need to take both surface
appearances and hidden aspects of identity into account.
The absence of a developed understanding of the

processes underpinning the strategic and tactical
negotiation of an ageing identity is, then, not simply the
result of ageist assumptions of later life as a time of
passivity and rigidity. These are the views that one

becomes stuck in one's ways, incapable of creative
energy, dependent on the second-hand roles ascribed to
age by younger generations or the workings of capital.

Important as they are, these forces coexist with
conceptual understandings of age that have paid little
attention to the creation and maintenance of a mature
identity. Instead, age has been cast into a dynamic of fixity
and change that can now be seen as a possibly false
dichotomy. Within this schema, the fixedness of social
conformity, an unresponsive body and an old dog

bemused by new tricks are set against the opportunities
and uncertainties of personal expansion and mix 'n'
match consumer display. Fixedness and change are seen

as opposites or alternative positions that can be adopted
in response to adult ageing. However, it might be the case
that the negotiations and accommodations tacit in the

maintenance of mature adulthood require an amalgam of
both fixity and change. There might, then, be aspects of

the mature imagination that lend stability, through
continuity and cohesion, as well as an ability to adapt
flexibly and play creatively with personal identity. Under
contemporary conditions, an adaptive and mature self
might contain an interplay of depth and surface, hidden

and apparent, fixed positions and flexible change in order
to negotiate social processes of ageing. Indeed, an
interplay of depth, surface and degrees of coherence

allows different, yet complementary, processes of self-
definition to take place simultaneously. A more complex

and ultimately more satisfying model of maturity, which
acts to preserve and protect continuity of self
development while at the same time adapting to the
opportunities and demands of multiple and episodic
environments, can emerge.
AN EXPERIENTIAL SPLIT
There are a number of reports in the literature that
indicate an experiential split between appearance and a

sense of selfhood in later life. And while these often refer
to physical change, this is by no means the only, or most
profound, manifestation of this disjunctive. An

examination of the positions explored by authors in this
area might illuminate ways in which tensions between

hidden and surface, fixity and change, are worked out in
maturity.
Perhaps the best known reference to this

phenomenon has been made by Simone de Beauvoir
(1970). She indicates that the ageing self as other has its
roots not in the experience of age itself, but in younger
adults' inability to imagine continuity between their

current selves and themselves in later life. 'The
characteristic mark of the adult's attitude toward the old
is its duplicity', she states (de Beauvoir 1970: 245),
meaning that while younger adults, most notably the
older adult's own children, officially respect age-seniority,

they will also seek to undermine and ultimately supplant
their parents. The lineage of this argument is oedipal and,
according to de Beauvoir, leads to a climate of

manipulation and subtle undermining of the mature
adult's position. This sense that later life is alien to
younger adults and may present a barrier, manifested by

others, to their own achievement contributes to the
experience of personal ageing as divided: 'Can I have
become a different being while I still remain myself?' (de

Beauvoir 1970: 315). De Beauvoir considered the view
that a solution based on 'feeling young inside' was an
outsider's misunderstanding of this dilemma. Rather, it is
the 'person I am for the outsider' who is considered old,

to which 'no challenge is permissible'. This argument is
continued by discussion of a mistaken correspondence
between ageing and disease and the view that 'Modern

society, far from providing the aged man with an appeal
against his biological fate, tosses him into an outdated

past, and it does so while he is still living' (de Beauvoir
1970: 423).
De Beauvoir's solution to the challenges of ageing is
to maintain existential projects, which are both a
continuation of interests and causes throughout life and

an adaptation to new social circumstances. Her
publication of La Viellesse at age 62 can be seen as an

example of the combination of continuing concerns and
new conditions. She continues: 'There is only one solution
if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life,
and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our

experience meaning', by which is meant 'devotion to
individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political
intellectual or creative work' (de Beauvoir 1970:601). So,
according to de Beauvoir, the challenges of

intergenerational rivalry, which lead to the dominant
perspectives of ageing as disease and outmoded
experience, result in an antagonistic relationship between

personal projects and socially constructed age. She
exhorts the continuing pursuit of projects which are
appropriate to later life, and thus not 'an absurd parody',
and at the same time maintain relatedness to wider social
issues.
The positive value of political commitment in later life
has been examined by Andrews (1991). She relates long-

term activism to optimism and the recognition of a
Freiresque (Freire 1972) oppressor within, which one has

to come to terms with and grow beyond. An encounter
with internalized stereotypes of others, and latterly
oneself, is noted as an important transformative step in
consciousness. Thus, 'Psychological development and the

commitment to work for social change are not
antithetical.' It is argued that, in the lives of the 15
political activists studied, 'These two processes have been

one and the same' (Andrews 1991: 206). Disjuncture
between social appearance and an internal apprehension
of mature identity can also be found in the work of
Thompson (1992). His study of subjective ageing, 'I don't

feel old', indicates that a rejection of 'old' does not
necessarily imply a rejection of the experience of ageing.
Rather, it is an act of 'defiance of a spoiled identity' which
'demands an exceptional ability to respond imaginatively

to change' (Thompson 1992: 27). It is, in other words, the
stereotype, rather than the experience, that is contested.
People use the label 'old' to describe negative experiences
associated with ageing, rather than ageing itself. He notes

that post-retirement activities are remarkably diverse.
Further, for intimate adult relations, 'later life is a time
when these relationships need to be continually rebuilt.

In this it is more like youth than the middle years of life'
(Thompson 1992: 35).
The view that emerges from these observations is

that an ageing identity requires a relatedness and
flexibility which is sufficiently resilient to repulse ageist
attack. There is an intimation that the mature imagination

works at more than one level in the puzzle of remaining
oneself, while simultaneously becoming different. The
relationship between personal expression and social
emancipation is a theme which underwrites much of the

discussion of masque and social space in this book.
Personal strategies by which this is achieved, however,
have only been lightly drawn and require a further
empirical and conceptual exploration for their

elaboration.
SOCIAL RELATIONS AND MATURE IDENTITY
Social relationships in later life have been reviewed
by Phillipson (1997), who notes a research focus on three

main areas: family life, marital relationships and
friendship patterns. It is concluded that relationships are

becoming increasingly diverse in form and that
supportive peer relationships are of great importance to a
sense of well-being. Family commitments are, as observed
by Finch (1995), subject to negotiation and depend on the

quality of a particular relationship to a larger degree than
previously thought. Coleman (1996), in an extensive
review of identity management in later life, comments on

the power of transformation which the perceiving self is
able to wield in the interpretation of and adaptation to

adversity. He concludes that there is a growing research
consensus that 'personality traits tend to be stable with

age, whereas key aspects of the self, such as goals, values,
coping styles and control beliefs are more amenable to

change' (Coleman 1996: 97). A managed identity can
achieve continuity through role changes, stigma and
threats to physical integrity, which Atchley (1989,1991)
identifies with 'a more tested and stable set of processes
for self management and more robust self concepts'.
Coleman also draws attention to the importance of
'domain specific self-concepts' (Lachman 1986; Markus

and Nurius 1986), which allow responding to vary
between contexts and categories. He suggests that these
characteristics allow for defence against the negative

attitudes of others and that, 'Although the changes
associated with age are perceived almost uniformly
negatively, most older people maintain high levels of

wellbeing, preventing their fears from being recognised
by coping successfully with the threats that come their

way' (Coleman 1996: 107).
Successful ageing is, in other words, marked by

heterogeneity, which is often the result of an interplay
between processes of selection, compensation and
optimization (Baltes and Carstensen 1996). This position

is reflected in Kastenbaum's (1993) observation that
creativity in maturity requires achievement of a balance
between the desire to encompass a wide variety of
expression and the control of expression within a

coherent structure, and in Cohler's (1993) observation
that maintaining a coherent narrative is itself a strategy
for the management of meaning and sustaining morale.
Feinstein (1997) suggests that personal myths, or

narratives, are self-consciously modified as they become
self-limiting with age and require adaptive
transformation. To these can be added Chinen's (1989)

reports from psychotherapy that capacities develop with
increasing maturity, from a period of 'youthful cleverness'
marked by linear direction and self-confidence, through a

pragmatic problem-solving phase, to more holistic and
metaphysical preoccupations.
In this context it is interesting to note Gubrium's

(1993) research, and, in particular, observations on the
manner in which experience is given voice. Throughout,
older adults emerge as careful listeners (Gubrium and
Wallace 1990). Gubrium suggests that an 'it depends'

quality to responding does not indicate an absence of
decision-making, but rather deliberation over a number
of possible alternatives. It 'Indicates that respondents
precede their answers with questions of their own about

experiential contingencies and that answers to these
questions condition what is eventually conveyed as
responses to inquiries. The "it depends" quality of
answers implies that the respondent can voice diverse

senses of the personal experiences being studied, varying
by narrative context' (Gubrium 1993: 48). This
conditional quality of mature discourse is, it is contended,

often missed by directive research agendas which
overlook its public or social quality. It is, in other words, a
sign of 'savvy people' whose responding in groups to a

helping professional varies considerably, depending on
the relevance of their expertise to the topic under

discussion, and could become anti-professional, or
attentive to expert opinion, depending on context. These
conclusions are similar to Biggs's (1993a) critical
reappraisal of groupwork, undertaken to examine older
adults' communication styles, which may by turns reflect

resistance, intolerance or a sharing of younger adults'
agendas.
A view emerges, from these reports, of maturity as a
time in which experienced social actors draw on a variety

of techniques and stratagems in order to maintain a
developing identity. Indeed, as physical sources of status
wane, it makes some evolutionary sense that other, more
sophisticated, methods come to hand to retain some form

of personal control. By the time mature adulthood is
reached, the psyche has at its disposal the pragmatism of
multiple responding, plus an increasing sense of personal

coherence which retains a sense of both masquerade and
the profound. It may thus be able to deploy identity very
much in the way of a performance.
COMING TO THE MASQUERADE
The use of a metaphor of masquerade to examine
ageing and experience can be seen in the work of the poet
W. B. Yeats (Ellman 1949; Webster 1973). Yeats devised

his own cosmology, in which individual development
consisted of attributes dramatized as their opposites, thus
concealing a more intimate self. For Yeats, the mask was
an ambivalent construct, which allowed for the

expression of personal presence and personality that the
wearer wished for, yet was a creation of artifice. Of
particular interest is Yeats's attribution of his continued
creativity in old age to the presence of the mask and to an
increased sense of personal wholeness (Pruitt 1982).
However, in this literary source, the mask is often used
rhetorically and was not clearly elaborated as a social

strategy. Dramaturgical analogies have been used by
Goffman (1960, 1967) to examine the presentation of self.
Some authors (Tseelon 1992, 1995; Smart 1993) have

drawn on Goffman's preoccupation with impression
management as a manipulation of social surfaces to
elaborate postmodern forms of identity. However, for

present purposes, Goffman's work fails to engage, with
the possible exception of his examination of stigma

(1963), with the interplay of hiddenness, depth and social
conformity. It is, as a number of authors (Gergen 1991;
Tseelon 1992; Biggs 1997c) have observed, as if
Goffman's actors have no interior or exterior, they simply
keep supportive interchanges going.
More recent employment of a masking motif can be

found in the work of both exponents and critics of
postmodernism. Jameson (1984: 65), for example,
identifies the postmodern condition with the eclipse of

parody by pastiche. 'Pastiche is, like parody, the
intimation of a peculiar mask, speech in a dead language:
but it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of
parody's ulterior motives ... Pastiche is thus blank

parody.' Style eclipses substance, surface, depth, and with
a waning of affect, there is no space for the outward
dramatization of inner feeling. The postmodern use of

mask, it is argued, fails to look any deeper than the
masquerade itself. This view finds some confirmation in
Baudrillard's (in Sandywell 1995) outline of successive

and loosely historical phases in how representation, of
which the relationship between masquerade and social

reality is an example, has been perceived. These begin by
describing representations as reflections of a pre-given
and basic reality. Then, with increased abstraction, masks
emerge which pervert reality and disguise some
underlying truth. Following this phase, representations

are said to mask the absence of any coherent reality, and
finally an environment in which distinctions between the
real and the unreal themselves become meaningless. This

description reflects the now familiar postmodern
argument that appearances no longer signify anything

other than their own surface meanings. However, it has
been given a novel and unexpected twist by Bauman
(1997), who argues that in the absence of determining
narratives, which in this case would include those
pertaining to a defined trajectory for middle and old age,

individuals are thrown back upon their own resources.
They are required to take responsibility for their own
actions and fashion their own identities precisely because

grand narratives and defined representations are no
longer reliably available. According to Bauman,
masquerade can, under these conditions, become another

means of avoiding personal responsibility. Masks might
simply reflect short-term episodes of identity which
embody an art of forgetting and interchangeability rather

than remembrance and continuity.
The most sustained critical employment of the

masquerade motif can be found in feminist discourses on
gender. Here, the contradictions of feminized identities

have given rise, it is argued, to masking as contested
territory, including both conformity and resistance to
gender stereotyping. The relationship between
masquerade and femininity has been noted by a number
of authors (Nava 1992; Tseelon 1995; Lury 1996), with an
emphasis on an ability to engage in and subvert dominant
identity statements through performance and play.

'Artificiality', states Tseelon (1995: 34), 'is not
threatening in itself. It is a means to an end.' The debate is
framed, she notes, in terms of whether 'decorativeness,

fashions, beauty procedures' are external to the self or
indicative of an inauthenticity of character. Tseelon
criticizes the approach of the psychoanalyst Jean Riviere

(1929), who associated feminine masquerade with a
hidden and unconscious masculinity in women, but did

not fully reject masking as a civilizing process. This is
unsurprising, as it was Riviere who suggested the title
Civilization and Its Discontents to Freud for his own
related work. Tseelon (1995: 38) continues that, with the
growth of urban society, 'Masks became a device for

creating a private sphere, even in public. Not surprisingly
this coincided with the emergence of the public
masquerade which combined desire for public interaction

with keeping private boundaries intact.' However, she
points out that while masquerade appears to challenge

fixed, and in this case patriarchal, definitions of identity, it
remains dependent on that dominant frame of reference.
A masque is therefore double-edged. It simultaneously
disguises and draws attention to what it tries to hide, just
as the process of disguise itself has elements of spectacle.

The suggestion of hidden otherness is a continuing theme
in work of this genre and extends to the artwork of Cindy
Sherman, who photographs herself in a variety of roles

and attitudes in order to unveil what Mulvey (1991) has
described as the use of the female body as a metaphor of
division between 'surface allure and concealed decay'.

Butler (1996) proposes that gender is by its nature
performative, then extends this logic to suggest that
performance is 'radically free' insofar as the 'materiality

of the body is vacated or ignored'. She promotes
'transgressive performances' such as drag to destabilize
traditional gender categories. According to Butler, one is
defined as much by what one is not as by the position that

is explicitly inhabited.
In many cases the deployment of masquerade has
been mediated by age. Thus, Matthews (1979) observed
that older women actively managed the information they
gave to younger people, trying simultaneously to
maintain a positive view of themselves and the adoption
of an age-free identity. Older women, she argued, had one

identity for other people and one for themselves. A
presentation of self dependent on the age of the other has
also been reported by Coupland et al. (1991). They note

that 'vividly contrasting age identities' were created by an
older woman, with a more assertive, lively and elaborated
presentation of self among peers than that shaped

between her and a younger woman. Viewed in this light,
strategies of painful self-disclosure and spontaneous

telling of age, observed by Giles and Coupland (1991) in
daycare settings, may function to maintain
intergenerational distance. They describe interaction at a
sufficiently superficial level to ensure the smooth running
of communication, and insulate both parties from the

threat of more intrusive and sustained contact. They are,
in other words, a mask.
Latimer (1997) has studied the elaborate
performances that professionals and patients adopt in

hospital settings and concludes that conforming identities
may simply denote the most effective strategy available to
older patients in achieving desired outcomes, rather than
being an expression of more genuine and deep seated

desires. In other, non-service settings, Healey (1994) has
indicated that a common strategy among older women is
to try to 'pass' as being from a younger age-group. She

notes the costs of such a strategy of pretence: 'in passing
you are saying that who you are at sixty, seventy, eighty,
is not ok. You are ok only to the degree that you are like
someone else' (Healey 1994: 82). It follows that it is
difficult to address both the process of ageing, at least in

public, and the creation of a more genuine ageing identity.
This view is supported by Ingrisch (1995), who suggests a
conformity to social expectations coexisting with
suppressed wishes and longings in her interviews with 30
women in old age. Identity, for these women, was marked

by a tension between conformity and resistance to
perceived social expectation.
Woodward (1991) specifically discusses the role of
masquerade in later life. For her, masquerade is a form of

self-representation that 'has to do with concealing
something and presenting the very conditions of that
concealment'. Thus, 'masquerade entails several
strategies, among them: the addition of desired body-

parts (teeth, hair); the removal or covering up of
unwanted parts of the body (growths, gray hair, "age-
spots"); the lifting of the face and other body parts in an

effort to deny the weight of gravity; the moulding of the
body's shape (exercise, clothing)' (Woodward 1991: 148).
In the deployment of the masque, youth becomes a

normative state to which the body has to be restored. Age
becomes a process of dispossession and the cover-up, an
exercise teetering on the brink of the grotesque. Through

this intrinsic ambiguity, masquerade again becomes a
process of submission to dominant social codes and
resistance to them. Woodward's observation that
masquerade in later life involves concealment and

pretence, and is at the same time an expression of the
ageing condition, emphasizes the reflexivity of masking in
this context. It is a thing that is played with, which while
obscuring signs of ageing is also drawing attention to the

fact that a deceit is taking place. In other words, the mask
is not the same as the person underneath and 'tells a
certain truth of its own'. Woodward (1991: 148) also
links masking and external attacks on the self: 'In a

culture which so devalues age, masquerade with respect
to the ageing body is first and foremost a denial of age, an
effort to erase or efface age and to put on youth.’
However, it is often unclear from these observations
whether one is engaging primarily in a discourse on youth
rather than the subjectivity of old age. The physicality of

feminine masquerade, centred on the visual and the body,
leads masking to be understood first and foremost as a
concrete phenomenon which is prioritized over other

forms of presentation. Resistance appears cloaked in the
melancholic and the grotesque, a theatre of old bodies
playing at youth; whereas for others youth can be put on
like a summer dress. We do not, however, change bodies

as Baudrillard and Butler would somewhat breezily have
us believe. A somewhat enigmatic affirmation that this
process simultaneously reveals and disguises requires
further elaboration. It appears unclear whether this

simultaneity is a failure of the 'youthful' project, a subtle
play or parody on the ambiguity of a mature imagination
or a source of Foucauldian resistance to an established
order. Masquerade alone can be seen as an attempt to

manipulate this intersubjectivity and achieve a balance
between the personally real and the disguise.
THE USES OF PERSONA
The persona is an essentially social phenomenon
which encompasses the roles we play and the
compromises we make for the sake of 'fitting in'. It

expresses accommodations the psyche makes to social
requirements, the adoption of social conventions in order
to be taken seriously by other participants in social
discourse, to be given a legitimized voice. The metaphor

arises from the use of masks in classical theatre, which
disguised the actor, described a character and amplified
the voice. In analytical psychology, it describes a way in
which identity is presented in acceptable ways to others.

From this perspective, the work of Goffman and other
symbolic interactionists would be seen as elaborations of
the persona. Neither is the mask as persona primarily
physical, although habitual and repetitive performance
may shape the contours of the face and body. The persona
is a device through which an active self looks out at and
negotiates with the world, to protect the self and to

deceive others.
It has already been mentioned that Jung was not

overly concerned with the persona, perceiving it as a
diversion from a true understanding of the individual self.
As a result, he left it conceptually underdeveloped. 'The
persona is a complicated system of relations between

individual consciousness and society, fittingly enough, a
kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite
impression upon others and on the other to conceal the

true nature of the individual' (Jung 1967b: 303). He also
believed that, 'Fundamentally, the persona is nothing real,
it is a compromise between individual and society as to
what man should appear to be' (Jung 1967b: 158).
Contemporary descriptions of persona have

concentrated on a number of aspects of its function. First,
the persona is now seen to hold positive qualities that

facilitate social interaction. It acts as a bridge between the
social and the personal. Frieda Fordham (1956: 49) notes,
for example, that 'It simplifies our contacts by indicating
what we may expect from other people and on the whole
makes them pleasanter, as good clothes improve ugly

bodies.' As Samuels et al. (1986: 107) say, 'There is an
inevitability and ubiquity to persona ... involving all the
compromises appropriate to living in a community.'

According to this view, the persona is a necessary part of
social life, making life more predictable, protecting the
self and others from less acceptable or 'ugly' parts of

people's personalities that might inhibit day-to-day social
exchange. The social world is taken as a given in such an
interpretation. For while these authors, especially

Samuels (1993), welcome the extension of analytical
psychology to broader social concerns, little
consideration is given to the construction of social space,
why some characteristics of individuals are accepted and

others not, except through the mechanism of the
individual repression of inconvenient beliefs and
attitudes. The persona may fulfil the important function of

connecting inner and outer worlds, of grounding personal
fantasies in social reality, but it extracts the price of social

conformity.
A second perspective continues the theme of social
accommodation as problematic. This line of thought
expands upon Jung's original observation that the
persona restricts self-development and thus genuine

communication. Particular attention has been paid to
over-identification with the persona, such that social
actors mistake the mask for genuine personal identity.

Samuels (1984,1993) describes adopting a rigid persona
as being undertaken at significant cost to personal
development, most notably through an inability to own

aspects of the personality that might conflict with the
social mask, and the projection of unacceptable parts of
the self on to others. Further, over-identification with the

mask eclipses depth and awareness of internal influences
on behaviour. 'The ego, when it is identified with the
persona is capable only of external orientation. It is blind
to internal events and hence unable to respond to them ...

It follows that it is possible to remain unconscious of
one's persona' (Samuels et al. 1986: 93). These conditions
can lead either to a feeling that social interaction 'has
merely the value of an amusing playground' (Jung 1967b:
199) in which no commitments are binding and nothing
touches the self, or to a position in which the mask
becomes increasingly mistaken for the whole of personal
identity. Thus, if social actors express themselves
primarily through social masking, the mask can become

fixed, welded to consciousness so completely that one
becomes unaware of other potential avenues for self-
expression, and even that one is wearing a mask at all. In

other words, one exists in a world of surfaces.
Elsewhere (Biggs 1997c) it has been argued that
thinking of the mask as a bridge and as a betrayal of self-

expression has underplayed a third key function of
persona performances. The social mask does not simply
disguise, it also protects the wearer from assaults to
personal identity arising from inhospitable social

circumstances. Professional helpers, for example, who
have to perform socially necessary yet personally
challenging tasks as part of their role, will be protected

through the adoption of a 'professional persona' from
thoughts and feelings which might otherwise damage
their psychological well-being. Tasks such as the
protection and removal of vulnerable people from close
relatives, undertaking caring or tending which breaches
normal codes of intimacy, such as medical examination,
incontinence care or the handling of dead bodies, extract

an emotional cost which the professional persona largely
mitigates. Similarly, it may be necessary for an older
person to adopt a certain persona, such as being entirely

dependent or independent, playing dumb or becoming
overly persistent and repetitive to be recognized, to gain a
voice in age-stereotyped situations. Such performances

gain what is required from a situation with minimal
investment and protect the core self from potentially

damaging exchange. They are, that is, a form of resistance
to frightening or demeaning situations, as long as contact
is restricted to short episodes or the protective function is
robust and well rehearsed.
Within traditional understandings of analytical

psychology, the persona is seen as restricting processes of
individuation throughout the first half of life and is then
effectively shed as individuation gathers pace in the
second. This posture can now be seen to underplay two

elements of the masking process. First, as has been
pointed out by Brooke (1991), more parts of the self do
not simply become available to consciousness as
individuals mature: awareness of personal identity also

becomes increasingly more abstract. This implies that the
conscious ego is increasingly capable of reflexivity,
becomes aware of differing aspects of identity and, by

degrees, can influence their relative power at any one
time. Second, an exclusive focus on individuation fails to
recognize this protective role of the persona, emphasizing

instead its inhibiting function. However, it is now argued
that the social mask not only restricts self-expression, but

also protects parts of the self that are vulnerable to social
forms of attack. Once it is recognized that later life is also
a period in which significant social constraints are placed
on self-expression, the importance of a continued role for
social masking as protection becomes clear.
In this context lessons can be drawn from Hopcke's

(1995) observations on the use of persona-like
resistances by oppressed or minority groups. Older
adults, while not referred to directly, would qualify as

such a marginalized and stigmatized group. He argues
that social marginality places gays, lesbians and people of
colour in an ambivalent relationship with the persona,
which becomes simultaneously a means of expression, of

communication and of performance of an otherwise
hidden identity and an expression of its denial. For 'social
outsiders', Hopcke (1995:13) claims, the persona

performs an especially important function as a 'mask that
feigns individuality'. Interaction between the persona and
those shadow parts of the self that have to be denied in

conventional social interaction is a contradiction from
which a more complete sense of selfhood must come.
If resistance is centred on 'race', the problem

becomes, according to Hopcke, one of invisibility in a
dominant and potentially hostile culture. Conformity
takes the form of unflattering caricature and individuals
are placed in a double bind in which voice is achieved

through a rejection of cultural rootedness. Lury (1996)
has similarly described a tension between imitation and
authenticity as being focal in exchanges between
dominant and minority cultures. Under such conditions,

accommodations to a dominant culture convey 'a
pernicious sense of being an impostor, of not having
deserved this status, of having fooled someone or gotten
ahead unfairly.' Similarly, 'To capitulate to outsiderhood

means a suppression of the self through persona
falsification or identification, but to challenge
outsiderhood may result in the development of a persona

which in its authenticity is a threat to the stereotype and
is therefore used to further attack and suppress the
individual' (Hopcke 1995: 109).
As a gay man, Hopcke sees a solution in the display of
previously hidden identities through masquerade, in
which the mask becomes a channel for a sort of

expressive liberation from everyday constraint. This
parallels observations by Kaminsky (1993: 261) that
marginalized groups need to create their own definitional
ceremonies when faced with 'crises of invisibility'. Among

Yiddish-speaking older people such ceremonies pose
'strategies that provide opportunities for being seen, and
in one's own terms, garnering witnesses to one's own
worth, vitality and being.'
Hopcke pushes the theoretical limits of persona,
however, by claiming that there are authentic and
inauthentic uses that can be made of it, which he
identifies with the expression of increased individuation.

A conventional Jungian interpretation of such a
performance, however, would emphasize its regressive
character as the restoration of a different, if more

comfortable, mask, rather than a genuine expression of
selfhood. The criticism is based on a presumption not that
the expression of gayness is in some way regressed, but

that masquerade is still an ingenuine way of expressing it.
As a mechanism of transformation, Hopcke (1995: 210)
claims that the mask 'eliminates the wearer's identity',

thereby 'eliminating the ordinary self and liberating the
wearer from everyday constraints so as to permit an
expansion of self and a sense of freedom.' What this
interpretation makes explicit is that personae can become

a vehicle for the transcendent. And through the
experience of 'identity reversals' the persona absorbs the
impacts of wounding social stereotyping and, under

certain circumstances, turns them against stifling
conformity.
A discussion of changing patterns of social
relationships in later life, of masquerade and of social
personae has raised a number of questions that suggest a
particular dynamic to the maintenance of an ageing

identity. This dynamic will be explored in more detail
below. The phraseology of persona and masquerade also
requires elaboration at this point. Persona seems to imply

episodes in which a relatively fixed identity is installed
and deployed, while masquerade connotes a more
dynamic process of performance which is undercut by

external orders of control. One implies an inwardly driven
deployment of identity, the other a more fluid response to
social demands; one position, the other process. To

express this amalgam of fixity and mutability, the term
masque will be used. Masque refers to the arena of inner
and external contingencies within which the deployment
of personae and the performance of masquerade are

contained.
THE MASQUE AND MATURITY
The concept of masque, which draws on persona and
masquerade, can be used to elaborate two themes
emerging as key to the management of a mature identity.
First, there is a need to negotiate multiplicity, in terms of
a wide variety of unstable social situations that arise

through contemporary relations and in terms of the
options available in the way that the self presents an
acceptable face to others. Second, there is a need for

cohesion and continuity which comes to light in the
putting together of a personal narrative in the here and
now and in grounding present experience of self in a

personal past as a sort of pathway to the present. These
twin requirements lend shape to contemporary forms

that a mature imagination might take. In a modern
context, maturity, particularly in later life, contains the
contradiction that at the same time that a wide variety of
opportunities for psychological development become
available, creating inner sophistication, social expectation

provides a series of increasingly marginal and restrictive
social roles. The advent of postmodern conditions has
made a plethora of identities available. However, these

appear to be drained of significance and easily become a
means of avoiding an encounter with existential

questions of ageing. Both readings suggest psychological
processes that at one level allow engagement with social
expectation, whether multiple or restrictive, and at
another protect personal coherence and continuing
personal development.
A logic for age-identity as protective strategy and as
performance follows from these circumstances. It is

concluded from what evidence on the subjectivity of
mature adulthood and old age is available that there
exists an experiential sophistication in maturity.
Experience has made a variety of presentations of

identity, a repertoire, available to the performer that was
less available to earlier life phases, where deployment
was either too inflexible or insufficiently varied in
resources. This would suggest that the attribution of

rigidity to the mature personality in ageist society is
largely a projection, and an intolerant one, from a
dominant and younger group. By contrast, a reading of

age as increasing sophistication in the deployment of
masquerade and movement between different priorities
for the self may be particularly suited to the flexibility and
contingency of identity required by contemporary society.
According to this viewpoint, and contrary to popular
assumptions about the ageing process, maturity gives rise
to an expanded capacity for selfexperience. Rather than
being primarily outwardly directed, it is directed inward

as part of a 'duty to pay serious attention' to the self as a
psychologically distinct, developing and spiritual entity.
In addition to being something of a natural process in

later life, this focus on internal coherence acts as an
antidote to ageist ascriptions circulating in the social
world. In order to survive, however, this process of

becoming also requires shielding from notions of correct
or 'successful' ageing imposed by a social milieu, largely
hostile to the mature project of increased depth and self

exploration, replacing it by expression through the
mechanisms of restriction or surface multiplicity. This
interpretation of the uses of social masking is shown in
Figure 4.1.
Figure 4.1 The uses of persona.
An inhospitable social climate has made the

deployment of protective identities an effective strategy
and point of resistance against such predations of the self

and also a means of ensuring continued self-development.
In the inimicable spaces provided by a youth-obsessed
culture, hospitals, surgeries, centres of social care, soap
operas, supermarket checkouts and any number of the
anonymized intergenerational encounters of everyday

life, masquerade provides a way of keeping it simple. The
real business of continued self-development can continue,
unintruded upon, within. Masque, as an interaction of

appearance and depth, has been made a necessity by
changed life priorities that do not fit well with the age-
ascriptions of the dominant culture; self-development by
subterfuge against the ground of inhospitable
constructions of age.
The functions required by a mature psyche are, then,

to negotiate possibilities that emerge for self-presentation
while maintaining a personal sense of coherence. This

suggests the possibility of personal becoming at different
levels and in the service of different psychological
functions. At the level of persona and masquerade, the
postmodern facility of mutation and multiplicity is

preserved. The social mask, as the outermost layer of the
psyche, acts to find a place in the social world through a
delicate interplay of conformity to the expectations of
others and the protection of personal thoughts and

feelings from observation and interrogation. As such it
contains that certain form of becoming which absorbs the
props and opportunities, the episodes that facilitate the

creation of a variety of identity statements. It becomes the
surface on which identities are created.
At a deeper level of becoming, the psychological
processes are organized around a guiding principle of
personal coherence. Here, a sensibility for continuing self-
development is maintained, of a different order from that

arising from consumer culture and which approximates
individuation and gerotranscendence. Masking and
masquerade raises the question of what lies behind the

masque and mature imagination, which, according to this
view, is not a simple question of a perpetual interplay of
surfaces. Rather, a masque intimates an entity behind the

conceit and thereby a purpose to the patterning of masks
and identities. This hidden intelligence resists the pull of
the market-place of consumer identity. It emphasizes the

interplay of self-continuity, cohesion and coherence
within mature consciousness, in which memory is valued
and experience built upon as the palate of an actualising
self. Deeper still may lie an unconscious, personal or

collective, the mindfulness or life-force that drives
continuing self-development. The depth of identity
conveyed here does not, however, intend a fixed series of
psychological levels. It might, instead, describe
distinctions that can be made in the process of negotiating

connection between the social and the personal and that
are the products of particular social and historical
circumstances. It is suggested that the psyche coheres
certain formations as various forms of threat and
opportunity are encountered, and as part of that

encounter the psyche becomes layered. Each layer holds,
for a certain time, an amalgam of fixity and becoming,
which, given other circumstances, may itself change.
LIKELIHOOD AND THE LAYERING OF MATURE IMAGINATION
This distinction between persona and masquerade as
one layering of psychological process and a deeper

project of personal coherence as another, makes available
a psychological distance, an emergent containing space in
which it is possible to think, reflect and experiment with

the performative. A degree of choice is thereby allowed to
enter performance, so that at times an identity may be
created or adopted, but at other times the whole
performative stance might be dropped. This latter
attitude refers to a 'What the hell' response, of wearing
purple hats, of an uninhibited display of self, regardless of
the gaze of the other. This does not preclude occasions
where a mature imagination can 'play' at being
uninhibited, which is certainly a performative possibility.
It indicates that the mature self is capable of using or
discarding the performance of identity depending on
circumstance or pure bloody-minded caprice. For most of
the time, however, the space between personal coherence

and masquerade centres on the likelihood of a
performance being convincing. 'Likelihood' that a mask
will sufficiently shield or disguise, that performance

completes the bridge between the social and the personal,
becomes a core organizing principle of identity in mature
adulthood. How likely is it that I have to repeat myself to

be listened to, how likely that I have to play at becoming
dependent/independent to get my immediate needs
addressed, how likely that I can appear ageless, youthful,

wise, gracious?
Sometimes mask and self may be sufficiently

compatible for underlying priorities and coherences to
emerge through the mask; the mask becomes an elastic

skin that enhances self-expression. At times this
relationship becomes rigid and restrictive and at yet
others the relationship is ambivalent, as it both hides and

through the act of hiding reveals that something is being
disguised. On occasions when the possibility of acting-
through the masque arises, a degree of fit may be
obtained between the mask adopted and the inner self.
When this occurs, the expression of genuine experiences

of ageing and the existential questions that ride in their
train becomes a possibility. In circumstances inhospitable
to the display of a mature and embodied identity, the

mask worn would serve a protective function, a retreat
into superficiality, whereby a state of unquestioning
everydayness or parody might occur. However, these

protections are deployed rather than becoming
substitutes for mature identity. Indeed, it would be a
signature of mature identity, should deployment

following a deeper logic be taking place.
Questions of likelihood remind us of the connective

function of the persona and that personal identity needs
to be grounded in social relations in some form. This

includes an attendant tension between selfhood as
intersubjectively real and as internally coherent. Erikson,
it has been argued, chose the first of these routes to self-

expression, while Jung took the second. However, it is
becoming increasingly clear that elements of both become
apparent as ageing takes place. Both of these original
formulations eclipsed the employment of masking,
through either confounding mask and identity or negating

its value. Both, alone, are inadequate to the task of
negotiating a sustainable sense of selfhood. If the self
were to become unconnected from the social, as

suggested by a quest for a personal internal logic, then the
possibility of distinguishing between fantasy and external
reality would become diminished, if not impossible. Too

exclusive a focus on the intersubjectively real, to see
oneself as others see you, on the other hand, abjures
those personal sources of coherence in favour of shifting

social sand. In mature adulthood, forms of connectedness
include embodiedness and its associated awareness of
finitude, personal memory as well as social interaction.
An exploration of masking as a communication between

internal coherence and intersubjective meaning reveals
that self-expression is both multilayered and
multifunctioned. It is simultaneously a bridge between
inner and outer worlds, can exact a toll of conformity,
protects self-development in inhospitable circumstances,
displays as well as hides the mature identity yet does not
rupture the relationship between the personal and the
social.
If the proposals for the mature imagination outlined
here are accepted then certain conclusions follow
concerning its subjectivity and shape. The subjectivity of

mature adulthood is presented as being multilayered and
in a dynamic relationship to the social conditions in which
it is found. This layering supplies a connective yet

protective function in relation to social reality, with
different contexts supplying different possibilities for

authentic self-expression. When these possibilities are
restricted, either through negative stereotyping or a

denial of ageing through multiplicity, mature subjectivity
takes on a Machiavellian aspect. Authentic aspirations
and potentials, which refer equally to de Beauvoir's
projects and reflections on the 'real self' in the
psychotherapies, are protected and subject to subterfuge.
They exist at depth and reflect a need for coherence,
occasioning a layering of the personality. Remembered
experience and continuity of identity would be one source
of integrity that is so shielded. When possibilities for the
expression of an underlying selfhood are enhanced,
masque becomes a flexible medium for communication,

as internal and surface patternings of identity coexist and
covary. They dance together in a marriage of fixity and
change and a harmonious relationship between

continuity and immediate coherence. According to this
perspective, contemporary ageing is a process that can
yield significant personal development, but rarely under

circumstances of its own choosing. It is a process that
requires strategies for positive maintenance and a
balance between inwardly and outwardly directed

personal development.
5
Midlifestyle
MIDLIFE AND THE MATURE IMAGINATION
Midlife has become an important cultural crossroads
for the mature identity, bringing into sharper focus a
debate on the relationship between appearance and

authenticity. Should lifestyles developed in middle age be
extended for as long as possible across the remaining

lifecourse? Should midlife occasion a significant, and in
some cases traumatic, break with the priorities of
younger adulthood? Is it the case that midlifestyles have

become an age-specified masquerade?
There is perhaps a tacit wish within the development

of midlifestyles that the problems of ageing can be, if not
eliminated, postponed almost indefinitely. This unstated

desire is buoyed up by a wide variety of social currents,
which include a move towards immediacy in

psychotherapy and counselling, but also extend to include
the representation of adult ageing in the media and in the
production of midlife manuals.
One idea that recurs in the literature on mature

adulthood is the notion that the cornerstones for a fruitful
late life are set in the middle years. This is a trend which
crosses disciplines and subject areas. In terms of
economy, Cutler (1997) reviews an international policy
concern about the readiness of midlifers to accrue

resources, in terms of both disposable finance and
independent lifestyles that will sustain them in later

years. Erikson and his followers (1986), as has been seen,
place significant emphasis on midlife generativity as a
preparation for and determinant of psychological

integrity in old age. Wames et al. (1998) review the
importance of healthy lifestyles adopted at this stage of
life if health status is to be maintained in later years.
A reading of the literature on midlife is suggestive of

at least two ways of interpreting the value of this period
for the mature imagination. On the one hand, it is viewed

as a distinctive episode in the lifecourse, in which certain
questions about meaning and existence require a
response. This perspective is closely allied to the idea that
midlife provokes some form of crisis which itself marks a
transition into a new phase of development. On the other

hand, midlife has come to characterize a form of lifestyle
in itself. This notion, of what has been called
midlifestylism, includes within it a series of distinctive

values and attitudes. Midlife is not portrayed as a point of
lifecourse change, it is not liminal, in the sense that the
first interpretation implies; rather, it marks a plateau

which the successful midlifestylist maintains for as long
as body, money and psychology allow. In both
interpretations there is a tension between what can be

chosen and what forces itself on to social, psychological
and physical agendas regardless of the wishes of the
individual.
The notion of midlife is therefore rich in paradox. It is

marked by an awareness of increasing certainty in the
lifecourse and of increasing uncertainty. The certainties
include a growing apprehension of finitude, that things
cannot go on for ever and that there is not an infinite

amount of time in which to achieve all that one wishes in
life. Time begins to take its toll, both as the generation
above begin to die and as the effects of physical ageing
etch themselves on to the personal body and those of

one's contemporaries. At the same time these intimations
of limit also increase awareness of the uncertain nature of
existence. At a personal level they hold within them a

narcissistic threat to one's own immortality, an increased
anxiety and the beginnings of a search for a solution to
this puzzling limitation on what had previously seemed to

be an unending ascent. These new concerns may come to
replace achievement anxiety associated with the building

of a career and family. Indeed, normative expectations
from the first half of adult life can take on a coercive
quality if they no longer appear to fit newly emerging life
goals and circumstances. A confusing patterning of social
and physical life events begins to take shape during this

part of the lifecourse. Midlife is a period of peak
achievement and competence in many areas, yet at the
same time it intimates that pre-existing goals and

priorities may not hold. Unless alternative trajectories are
explored, the future simply consists of a progressive

narrowing down, in which doors are closing and on
occasion are being closed unnecessarily by social
structuration and interpersonal expectation.
While there are dominant trends, these may be
mitigated by local and contemporary patterns. An

increase in non-lifecourse determined mortality, such as
that created by the AIDS epidemic, war or dramatic

environmental change, might affect attitudes to mortality
and serve to loosen the association between old age and
death. Similarly, the spread of diverse lifestyles that do
not necessarily conform to the standard model of the

heterosexual, the nuclear and the work-determined might
disrupt conventional conceptions of lifecourse
development. Whatever the local midlife caught
individuals out of sympathy with the general expectations

of their society, yet this itself was to be expected as an
inevitable product of that particular social construction of
the lifecourse. This interpretation of midlife as crisis had

its basis in functionalist social theories, whereby it was
proposed that roles and relationships served to integrate
individual aspirations into the wider social good, as
reflected in pre-existing social structures.
Within the intellectual atmosphere of the 1950s and
1960s, midlife characterized a period that was both to be
expected and in some way anti-normative. Social
structuration around work and family made midlife a
turning point, which developed an aura of crisis because
it also required a shedding of dominant sources of self-
worth. It could be said that midlife split the functionalist
atom, insofar as it peeled social expectation off from
individual desire and aspiration. It characterized a period
of the lifecourse marked by an increasing lack of fit. The
midlife adult was caught in a double bind, in which one
could only become a good, age-normative citizen by
acting out an individual resistance to social expectation.
Midlife adults were expected to give up on the values that
had previously served them well and seemed to be the
only positive set of lifecourse values around. The
normative expectation was thus one of initial resistance
to narratives of disengagement and decline (Cumming
and Henry 1961, to which the individual eventually
succumbed and thereby got back into synchrony with
what society expected of a man or woman of that age. It
became a period of anticipated resistance, resolved for
the greater functional good of intergenerational
succession.
It is perhaps unsurprising that the notion of midlife
itself, and of midlife as a critical lifecourse event,

generated a simultaneous interest from writers in the
psychodynamic tradition. Jaques (1965), who placed

crises as occurring between 35 and 65 years, was at first
interested in changes to creative, and most notably
artistic, production. He described mature creativity as a
development beyond the 'hot from the fire' approach of

younger adulthood, towards a process of interplay, in
which intuitive influences from the unconscious are
combined with a considered apperception of a product
and reactions to it. He then used psychodynamic case

material to examine the depth psychology of this process
and how it 'manifests itself in some form in everyone'
(Jaques 1965: 506).
'The paradox is', he claimed, 'that of entering the

prime of life, the stage of fulfilment, but at the same time
the prime and fulfilment are dated. Death lies beyond.'
This dual apprehension is exemplified in a remark from
Jaques's patient, who observed that while one has gained
the crest of the hill, and can now see beyond the upward
slope, one can also see that the journey has to end. Jaques
made his study of creativity and clinical material fit
together by bringing Kleinian theoretical concepts to
bear. He particularly focused on explanations of adult

psychological processes in terms of an emerging
'depressive position', first encountered in early childhood
development and re-experienced as a characteristic

adaptive response to ambiguity throughout life. Somehow
losses experienced by the infant, and in adulthood the
awareness of personal death, had to be integrated into an

individual's view of the world. The emergence of a
depressive position does not mean, according to this
view, that one gets depressed, but that one has managed
to integrate both positive and negative experiences, and

can hold them in mind at the same time. Death and the
midlife crisis are intimately linked because they trigger
the emergence of a new way of combining conscious and

unconscious material that would otherwise be split off
and lead to a fragmented personal identity. Accordingly,

the crisis is an internal, existential one, which, if
successfully resolved, results in what could be described
as a more considered, integrated, yet melancholy state of
being.
The influence of a psychodynamic approach can also

be felt in cross-cultural studies that have expanded upon
Jungian notions of difference between the first and
second halves of life, and employed the distinctly
psychodynamic Thematic Apperception Test. This test
was designed to capture psychological projections by
noting the associations respondents made to a series of
drawings whose meaning was deliberately ambiguous. In
particular, in Guttman's studies (Neugarten and Guttman
1968; Guttman 1975, midlife came to be seen as a period
in which traditional, and most notably gendered,
characteristics are reversed. Guttman indicates that in the
second half of adult life women become increasingly
engaged with life beyond the domestic, are more
assertive, outward looking and socially dominant. Men,
however, come to relinquish goals of social achievement
and external agency and exhibit increased interest in
caring, relationships, spirituality and 'magical mastery'
through inner growth. These studies do not seriously
question the gendered division of labour in younger
adulthood. It is assumed that these tendencies towards

child-rearing among younger women and work among
men emerge as a response to what Guttman calls the
'parental emergency'. Once the child-rearing phase of the

lifecourse has been completed, women and men have the
opportunity to develop those skills that they had
previously neglected. It is, perhaps, a specific

interpretation of the analytic concept of individuation, but
it is unclear what influence a historical blurring of rigid

gender activities would have on such narratives of
reversal.
King (1974,1980) identified many of the issues
associated with midlife for both genders as being
problems of narcissism. She describes this as consisting of

an 'Overvaluation of the self, inability to cathect their
sexual partners with object-libido, who were treated as
extensions of themselves, [such that] the actual needs of
their objects were treated with indifference' (King 1974:

31). In other words, midlife is seen as a time of self-
obsessed regard, with little thought or feeling for the
effects of personal conduct on others. It is as if the midlife
personality wanders, staring into a hand- mirror, through

relationships made superficial and a future made unseen.
Her patients rarely sought treatment directly because of
these issues, however, as they were mostly concerned

with the non-compliance of others to their will and
otherwise 'were not aware of their ailment' (King 1974:
32).
King's explanation for the phenomenology of midlife
that she describes rests on parallels between the
developmental and psycho-social tasks posed during

middle age and adolescence. The keynote here is that
both are perceived as periods of transition, of 'sexual and
biological change ... exacerbated by role changes and their
socio-economic circumstances' (King 1980:156). Both

lead to problems of activity and redundancy, dependency
and independence, a change from two- to one-generation
households and the making of new relationships, changes
to self-perception and the perceptions of others.

Cumulatively, these factors can precipitate a crisis of
identity. The nature of these changes suggests that King is
speaking about patients in later midlife, or those
experiencing conflicts associated with associated age-

norms. She indicates that resolution of these problems
produces a similar broadening of psychological
functioning to that described by Jaques.
The observation that people do not necessarily enter
treatment to cope with a midlife crisis as such is repeated
by Kleinberg (1995). He describes a 'character pathology'

of middle age in terms that are not dissimilar to King's
idea of self-absorption and the increasing staleness
identified by analytic psychology. The pathology is

described as consisting of: '1. The inability to enjoy
sexuality; 2. The incapacity to relate in depth to other
human beings, with lack of awareness of ambivalence and
a lack of capacity for mourning over the aggression

toward those who are loved; 3. A denial of aggression in
self and others, expressed in naivete; and 4. The lack of a
satisfactory, effective and potentially creative work
situation' (Kleinberg 1995: 211). Kleinberg's interest lies

in how this midlife dynamic is manifested in group
situations. It is difficult, he argues, to voice these concerns
in groups because of the risk of becoming a repository for
the similar, yet projected and unaccepted feelings of other

people in midlife. To admit concern in such a milieu is to
admit weakness and carry the burden of that fear of
weakness for others. Should such individuals participate

in group therapy, Kleinberg argues, feelings of stagnation
and frustration need to be worked through, even though a
preoccupation with their own personal crises often

makes it difficult for individual members to empathize
with the similar concerns in the group as a whole.
There are also important differences between the

management of identity in midlife and in adolescence.
This may be particularly the case in the deployment of
social masking. It will be recalled that for Erikson (1982)
the task of adolescence was to discover an acceptable

adult identity. Finding, through repeated experiment, a
preferred identity, a face that fits, came to be seen as the
gatekeeper to entry to the adult world. Failure to do so
would leave identity diffuse and unstable. The adolescent

is seen as being able to adopt and cast off different social
masks which protect an immature, tender and elusive
self. Adolescence is marked by moods and enthusiasms,
embarrassment and narcissism, as various personae are

worn, slip and are replaced. While midlife also appears as
a time of tension around identity and transition, it may be
subject to a different dynamic (Biggs 1997c). In midlife

the self is again presented with a choice of identities, but
rather than being driven by external pressure to find an
appropriate role, as was the case in adolescence, the

midlifer discovers internal dissatisfaction with an identity
that fits all too well. As midlife gains momentum, the

building of a conforming identity, at considerable effort
and psychic investment, is increasingly seen as a cost:
'Passion now changes her face and is called duty; I want
becomes an inexorable I must, and the turnings of the
pathway that once brought surprise and discovery

become dulled by custom' (Jung 1967a: 331).
Reading Jung, it is possible to discern a series of
responses to this dilemma, which come in and out of focus
as the problem of identity is brought to the fore. At first

the associations of younger adulthood are
unquestioningly maintained as being 'eternally valid'. As
dissatisfaction arises, the midlifer may cling to these
existing certainties, attempting to perpetuate them in the

face of disconfirmation from a variety of sources. Finally,
as alternative potential becomes expressed, a more
complete self is allowed into consciousness and a new,

more rounded identity is found. This would lead to the
conclusion that as social actors mature, the use made of
social masking varies, from a rigid signifier of adopted

roles to a more flexible use of the mask itself, the
distanced use of multiple masking and in some cases the

absence of masking altogether.
This interpretation of mask and identity at different

life phases allows a personal history of masquerade to
take shape. During adolescence, it would appear that
there is considerable distance between the ego, 'the real

me' as available to consciousness, and the masks adopted.
However, each mask is inflexible: you either have it or
you don't; in order to adapt, you cast it off and find
another one. The glue, so to speak, is weak, while the

alternatives are many. However, once a snug mask is
found it becomes a fixed adult identity. According to this
view, during the first half of adult life the glue gets
stronger and stronger until this outer layer is

indistinguishable from the self and one is in danger of
becoming one's mask. At the same time the mask
becomes more flexible with use, the tricks of social

exchange more practised. The mask can be turned to
many different situations, manipulated almost as if it
were not a mask at all, just a plastic, and agreeably

thicker, skin. Midlife then becomes a period in which the
costs of masquerade are apprehended, and as midlife

develops, so does the mask as an irritant to the ego. It is
less comfortable to wear, does not cover adequately, the
glue has become hard with age; but it may be too painful
to tear off. Samuels (1985) points out, for example, that
removal brings with it the fear that the ego, previously

protected, will disintegrate. Thus, an initial period, during
which the individual becomes aware of this tension, may
be marked by increased adherence to the mask and

projection of unwanted personal attributes on to others, a
period that would be dangerous to persons exhibiting the

characteristics that are presently being denied in the self
(Biggs 1989). It is only through the build-up of
contradictions between the inner and outer worlds that
distance is achieved and new identities are adopted.
Eventually, psychological energy, which had been held in

check by social conformity, is expressed in, Jungians
would argue, a more fulfilling and holistic personality.
FROM CRISIS TO LIFESTYLE
The debate on midlife, as described above, merges
two streams of discourse. One positions midlife in
relation to social function and social exclusion, the other

interprets it in relation to psychological change. A
consequence of such a merger is a loosening of the

antagonism between ideas of forward movement during
the lifecourse and the notion of a continuation of existing

themes. It may, in other words, be possible to progress by
the adoption of a different set of priorities. A process has
begun that problematizes linear development of the
former sort and, in so doing, raises narratives of conflict
and crisis. However, there is also a tension over the

treatment of these descriptions of midlife as a
recognizable, if socially constructed, experience. This
tension concerns what should be expected in midlife, and
what responses are to be considered adaptive. Should
King's, Kleinberg's and Jaques's writings be taken to

indicate that midlife gives rise to a number of attitudes
and behaviours that could be explained in terms of a
pathology, for example? Is it, as Jung (1967c) famously

opined, that the person who clings to the priorities of a
different, and in this case earlier, part of the lifecourse is
suffering from some form of neurotic illness? Should the

resolution of these tensions be to encourage conformity
to an intersubjectively determined, if ageist, lifecourse

pattern? Or is this concern over lifecourse direction itself
a script, a narrative that can be adopted or not as the
fancy takes us? Do people simply 'play' at having midlife
crises as a handy way of explaining immediate concerns?
There is also a tendency in the above descriptions to

domesticate midlife, to move from metaphors of crisis,
rupture and resistance to ones of transition. Transition is
more consensual, more mutative, a softer conception that
opens the possibility of multiple options for mature

identity. The debate, and thus the narrative of midlife, is
moved on from a phenomenology of midlife anxieties to
one of transmutation. Speaking in terms of transition
opens the way for a different sort of discourse. It allows

conceptions of adult identity to enter a Baudrillardized
world of simulacra, popular culture and consumer fantasy
where the transitory becomes an end in itself. If identity

is continually in transit it is not fixed anywhere, and while
the episodes and options available to it might be created
intersubjectively, they avoid being grounded other than in

a logic of their own. The possibility that particular age-
based lifestyles present such an opportunity is a

discussion to which we now turn.
MIDLIFESTYLISM
The issues raised in the previous section concerning

the creation of narratives for midlife and beyond have
been addressed by an academic and popular literature
that has focused on an active construction of lifestyle.

These lifestyles for maturity often do not maintain a clear
association with ageing and the lifecourse, except as a
point of negative reference. They are perhaps most
marked by a sense of the continuous, that things can carry
on very much on an even keel and without rupture, which
at the same time appears to have been bleached of serious
concern for continuity and the passage of time.
One manifestation of this process has been the
extension of 'midlifestyles' of various sorts into later

phases of ageing (Featherstone and Hepworth 1982,
1983; Conrad 1992), through, for example, the targeting
of older consumers by advertising agencies (Sawchuk
1995). In purpose-built retirement communities

(Kastenbaum 1993; Laws 1995) the material
environment has been carefully designed to act as a prop
to the performance of a simultaneously ageing and

ageless identity. Such experiments have been famously
described by the grey panther activist Maggie Kuhn
(1977) as 'playpens for the old', their defining feature
being an exclusion of communications and persons that

might disrupt identities created within that protected
space. Communes for older people as an alternative to
traditional conceptions of late-life have been researched
by Baars and Thomese (1994), as have 'snowbird' mobile

communities by Mullins and Tucker (1988), each of which
describes attempts by older adults to invent materially
living environments that support particular lifestyles,
with varying degrees of success.
Featherstone and Hepworth's (1983) seminal work
on lifestyle was the first to identify a new attitude to

middle age as celebrated in the popular media. They
contrast the traditional image of middle age in UK
newspaper cartoons of the 1970s and 1980s, including
'Andy Capp' and 'The Gambols', with 'George and Lynne',

who exemplify an entirely different lifestyle. The former
characters have reference points that link them to notions
of a traditional industrial working class and of an

essentially conformist and lower middle-class protective
environment, respectively, associated with norms and
expectations of the immediate post-war period. 'George
and Lynne' inhabit a somewhat different and narcissistic

world of leisure and active sexuality, supported by
George's unspecified executive position. Accordingly, this
lifestyle allows 'individuals who look after their bodies
and adopt a positive attitude toward life ... to avoid the

decline and negative effects of the ageing process and
thereby prolong their capacity to enjoy to the full the
benefits of consumer culture' (Featherstone and
Hepworth 1983: 87).
George and Lynne have created their own
environment in which to express their 'different' identity.

When their age is mentioned within the cartoon dialogue,
it is used as an opportunity for display and positive self-
surveillance, in order to exemplify the characters'
seeming immunity to the ageing process. Their

differentness is expressed in comparison to the
characters in rival newspapers, which the reader
understands, and more explicitly to foils in their own

strip. An exchange that illustrates this distinction takes
place between Lynne and their neighbour, Alice. Whereas
the svelte and eternally decollete Lynne claims that 'life
begins at forty', frumpy, traditional Alice states, 'But

everything else starts to wear out, fall out or spread out.'
By buying George and Lynne's paper readers are invited
to identify vicariously with their midlifestylism and
collude with the mockery of Alice's downward slope.

Featherstone and Hepworth (1983) conclude that for
such characters the good life is here and now and, as long
as their protected world is maintained, they can continue
to enjoy it 'deep into the middle years'.
The 1990s have seen midlifestylism become subject

to a series of labels that attempt to describe, to fix, the
increasingly indeterminate lifecourse. Sheehy (1996 has,
for example, named emerging lifestyles as 'middle-
scence'. The 1997 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary
catalogues two novel descriptions for the adult lifecourse
as adultescence or middle youth, in other words a 35- 45-
year-old with interests typically associated with youth
culture. Each demonstrates a broader trend towards the
blurring of traditional life stages and an associated desire
to name and segment it into ever reduced and fragmented
elements. This tendency has been particularly salient,
according to Holland (1996, in the expansion of
adolescence, both to include ever younger children and
spreading out into areas previously thought of as adult.
Under the influence of consumerism, it appears that
childhood has been peeled off from childlike and childish
behaviour. It is thereby possible for adults to indulge in
narcissistic enjoyment and spontaneity previously
associated with childhood, while at the same time
children are encouraged to feed off adult tastes. In

Holland's words, a 'dual audience of infantilised adults
and precocious children' has been brought into existence
by contemporary media and consumer culture. Such a

process is perhaps more salient in adolescence because it
is a cultural focus in Western societies.
The cultural flexibility associated with youth is also

reflected in language, so that suffixes attached to the stem
'child', such as -hood, -like and -ish, have few
counterparts during midlife and beyond. It may therefore

be more difficult to give voice to the unpeeling of
identities in maturity. Indeed, the language of maturity,
middle age and old age lends itself to single and fixed
positions rather than to multiplicity. Rather than describe

the fluidity of midlifestyle as a series of interwoven
trends, intimately associated with the passage of time,
there is a tendency to see it as in some way fixed and
immobile once it has been adopted.
Paradox is heaped on paradox once the variety of
images made available by contemporary cultural
environments is taken into account. The linguistic fixity
noted above requires reconciliation with a multiplicity of

material from consumer culture. Each image contributes
an episode that could be employed as a prop for
positioning the self in relation to age and in the creation

of a life-script. In addition to images of deprivation and
disadvantage characteristic of modern portrayals of age
in welfare policy (Townsend 1981) and the mass media

(Hobman 1990) can now be added an excess of identities
that play upon midlifestyle aspirations. These range from
specialist magazines and travel clubs for active older

people, through to the growth of ironic satire in
magazines such as the The Oldie. Age is deployed in a
number of settings. Age as chic, in the use of older models
by Issey Miyake in his 1995 'octogenarian collection'.

Here we encounter older women as spritely, confident
and sophisticated (Guardian 19 July 1997). Age as
resistance, in an uneasy portrayal, verging on difference

as grotesque, in the performance of theatre troupes such
as DV8. Here we find a naked 70-year-old woman (the

dancer Diana Payne-Myers) performing to subvert the
rigid aesthetic norms of ballet, but placed in a piece along
with an 'anorak wearing nerd', a shadowy voyeur and a
young and disabled female dancer (Independent 27 July
1997). Age as pastiche, in the performances of the comic,

Caroline Aheme, a younger woman who dresses as the
prim 'Mrs Merton' and then subverts this persona by
engaging in a series of salacious interviews with media

personalities. Age as self-centred, as indicated in Diverse
Productions' (1996) documentary on 'snowbird' lifestyles
entitled Spending the Kids’ Inheritance.
Most of these images have female subjects. Male
identities appear less often and in less diversity. They
conform more closely to the modernist pattern of threat
and crisis. Male midlife is portrayed as a period of sudden

and unpredictable change and periods of disruptive
madness; of, as one wife, reported in the East London
Advertiser (17 April 1997), put it, 'not playing with a full
deck'. It is portrayed as a period of throwing up
established work positions for second careers and the
betrayal of longstanding relationships for new partners
who are inevitably younger. It is portrayed, in other
words, as prone to desperate experiment at a time of
sexual and productive anxiety. In contrast to Mrs Merton,
the most popular male comedy character of 1990s UK

television has been Victor Meldrew, a rueful and resentful
persona who characteristically creates the circumstances
for his own downfall.
Typical of this novel and predominantly female accent
on midlifestyle in the 1990s has been a flurry of interest
in the 'mould-breaking' baby boomer generation as it

reaches its fifties. These articles have a marked tendency
to concentrate on the plight of ageing, and almost
exclusively female, Hollywood stars as points of

reference. Their tone is usually upbeat, noting that at 51
the British actress Helen Mirren had been voted sexiest
woman on TV, and that Julie Christie, Jerry Hall and Meryl
Streep 'still look terrific' and maintain a glamorous media

career (Guardian 12 June 1997).
Ambivalence, when it is expressed, has been couched
in the failure of the outside world to live up to

expectation. The self-styled mould-breakers find around
them a society that does not reflect the new world that
they had hoped to build. This divergence is expressed in
the language of age as 'the original founders of youth and
pop culture felt that growing up was an undesirable

option, not an inevitability' (Independent 1 June 1997)
and now discover that it is happening to them. It is
happening, one might say, to the generation who would

not trust anyone over 30.
Within these articles, one finds a growing concern
over the absence of a legitimate narrative for the second

half of life: 'Everyone knows what young people are like:
everyone knows what old people are like. What the hell
are middle-aged people supposed to be like? I don't know

the script, I don't know the play ... all I know is that I am
not yet decrepit enough for Mantovani but too long in the
tooth for Nirvana' (Guardian 8 January 1996). An
aggressive resentment at the immediate circumstances of

midlife is expressed by the novelist Howard Jacobson
(1998): 'We feel things closing down on us and yet, at the
same time, we feel we've never been more powerful,
intellectually, linguistically powerful. The idea of the

young snapping at our heels with their twitching
members and sexual prowess is nothing; we can have
them for breakfast.'
Carlin (1996) undertook a series of journalistic

interviews with Hollywood stars who are now in their
seventies. Rather than finding a group who engaged in

Baby-Jane like reclusiveness, he describes a number of
ways in which people, steeped in a culture of youth and
beauty, negotiated a mature identity. These identities
appeared as their youthful media personae became

untenable. Carlin's piece reads like a guidebook to the
dilemma of negotiating a serviceable new identity beyond
midlife: how it is done in the belly of the media beast. His

interviews describe a number of strategies. Some keep on
going by taking their age cohort with them as an audience
who know the original script, but can identify with the
tricks of ageing. Age is portrayed in rueful guise and the

star simultaneously distances herself from ageing itself,
which is in some way happening to her and to which she
supplies a commentary while continuing with her real
role as entertainer. Others have persisted with the

original conceit, playing, in various degrees of self-
knowledge, the youthful mask. That the audience appears
as interested in elements of the grotesque, of women in
their seventies singing and dressing as teenage

cheerleaders, as much as they are in the pieces being
performed. This evidences a curious instance of denial on
the part of the performers. Finally, there is an ironic

stance, which locates the contemporary self within a
social and historical process. The process of ageing and
identity is perceived as subject to rapid changes in

fashion, such as the switch from Marilyn Monroe as a
feminine icon to those of the hippies and of flower-power

naturalism, which these actresses experienced not only at
first hand but at the eye of the storm. 'I'm too old to be
beautiful and too beautiful to be old', says one respondent
who has learned to laugh at her experience, yet at the
same time build upon it. This last interview exhibits a

toughness of spirit which simultaneously bears the scars
of the struggle with youthful identity and has not entirely
shaken it off.
NARRATIVE APPROACHES
For those who lead more everyday lives than the
inhabitants of Hollywood, there is also a growing
literature to help the ageing individual negotiate
appropriate lifestyles amidst the paradoxes of

simultaneously increasing determinacy and
indeterminacy. Techniques are offered whereby identity
can be serviced and recreated.
For Litvinoff (1997) an answer lies in 'life-coaching'.
The USA, it is claimed, boasts around 3000 life coaches.
The method promotes a feeling- based and individualistic

can-do culture, which appears half counselling and half
management consultation: 'A coach is a hybrid of
business advisor, mentor, therapist, counsellor and

grandma, who thinks you're perfect and wants you to be
happy' (Litvinoff 1997: 4). Advice is often directive and
can be delivered over the telephone 'for half an hour a
week'. From this description, life coaching appears as an

invigorating top-up, a five-minute management of the self.
A growing interest in the narrative elements of
counselling and psychotherapy fits well with the servicing

of midlifestyles and identities. This form of therapy would
appear to contain many of the elements identified in
previous chapters as characteristic in maintaining a
postmodern identity. There is, for example, an emphasis
on loosening the relationship between current identity

and the personal and cultural past, a focus on creating
appropriate identities in and for the here and now, an
unpeeling of different aspects of the self and their

recombination. It is a technology for reinventing the self
which also adopts many of the elements of masquerade,
of telling ourselves stories for maturity that can then be

lived by. According to Feinstein (1997), mythic narratives
are needed to address the Targe questions of existence',
such as life, death and personal meaning. However, myths

no longer remain stable for generations, and must now be
personally recreated. Emphasis is placed on the
production of a servicable continuous narrative rather
than on continuity with a particular culture and past.

Within a narrative approach, 'the task of the counsellor is
viewed at that of assisting the client to "re-author" parts
of the life story' (McLeod 1996:173). The therapeutic

process consists of the retelling of a life story and the
construction of a new guiding narrative. There are no

value judgements made about the relative validity of old
and new narrative, except in terms of the client's
satisfaction with the story that emerges. Counsellors such
as Spence (1986) consider that historical truth should
give way to 'narrative truth', which McLeod (1996: 175)

describes as 'the construction of an account of events that
is coherent and allows the client to live a satisfying life.'
According to Rennie (1994), a narrative helps a client to

maintain distance from an inner disturbance, while
simultaneously allowing some covert processing of issues
surrounding it.
McAdams (1993) is perhaps the best known exponent
of the narrative tradition. He claims that 'Defining the self
through myth may be seen as an ongoing act of
psychological and social responsibility. Because our

world can no longer tell us who we are and how we
should live, we must figure it out on our own' (McAdams
1993: 35). McAdams (1985, 1993) has taken a particular

interest in the construction of identity in midlife. This he
conceives of as a time of 'putting it together'. The
hallmark of a mature identity is perceived as 'integrating
and making peace among conflicting imagoes in one's
personal myth'. These imagoes are the alternative
identities that McAdams believes are collected by people
in their thirties and early forties. Midlife, which is seen as

stretching from the forties to the late sixties, then consists
of a massive sorting out of these accumulated aspects of
self. According to McAdams, as individuals move through

midlife they become preoccupied with their own myth's
'denouement', and become more tolerant of the
contradictory quality of existence. This reorganization of

life's material takes place, however, in the service of the
present: 'When the present changes, the good historian

may re-write the past—not to distort or conceal the truth,
but to find one that better reflects the past in light of what
is known in the present, and can reasonably be
anticipated about the future' (McAdams 1993: 102). In
fashioning a history for the self, one becomes one's own

mythmaker and is seen to move towards 'post-formal'
and 'local' truths. According to this perspective, identity
in midlife and beyond becomes a matter of 'situationally

specific truths, on solutions and logical inferences that are
linked to and defined by particular contexts' (McAdams

1993: 200).
The narrative that McAdams and others have
described is not a simple process. It includes elements of
immediacy, of the here and now, which lead to identities
that are pragmatically created to meet current needs. A

postmodern emphasis on episodes and situations rather
than continuities has been retained, as has an ability to
reconstruct the self based on immediate personal

concerns. However, there is a simultaneous awareness of
processes and changes in self-perception that relate to
the lifecourse as a whole. Narrative therapy describes a

technology of the self which fits midlife well. It
simultaneously recognizes and attempts to rewrite the
lifecourse script.
MANUALS FOR MIDLIFE
The indeterminacy surrounding ageing as an identity

has led to a number of manuals, which in their varied
ways constitute an attempt to interpret the changing
lifecourse. These manuals claim to map the changing
phases of maturity and add definition to its shape,

thereby reflexively creating a view of the lifecourse in
their own image. Within them are a number of answers to
the questions that mature identity raises, which range
from the elimination of ageing to the now familiar
territory of age as a reinvention of self. Three attempts to

rechart the lifecourse are examined below.
In The Middle-aged Rebel, Peter Lambley (1995)

states that at the time of writing he was 48 years old, had
almost retained the fitness gained in his twenties and was
several times happier than he was in young adulthood. He
draws on the particular cohort experience of the post-war

boomer or 'Woodstock' generation, who now find their
customary attitude as critics of the status quo undercut
by having themselves become something of a cultural

establishment. The answer to midlife anxiety that
Lambley proposes is to take up this challenge by learning
how to 'rebel constructively and responsibly against
traditional ideas'. This is achieved in a typically 'boomer'

way of taking control of what is happening through diet,
exercise and a process identified as 'dream-mapping'.
Dream maps, it is argued, take shape between the end of
childhood proper, identified at approximately six years

old, and the onset of adolescence, and are themselves a
subtle form of rebellion, although the precise nature of
the object of this rebelliousness is unclear. Subsequent
development through relationships and work includes

attempts to flesh out the dreams, in the belief that, as
Lambley claims, we 'had the power to get what we want'.
By midlife, these dreams have been undermined by a

series of compromises. Once these compromises have
been critically re-examined, it will be discovered that the
greatest hindrance to self-development is the previous

inability of the reviewer himself or herself to learn the art
of responsible rebellion. This process leads to a

rediscovery of the personal dream, adapted to the more
complex environment of established relationships and
obligations that is typical of the middle of the lifecourse.
The Middle-aged Rebel is marked by a continuity of
style. The life experience of the 'Woodstock' cohort, of

increasing personal choice and self-expression, is now
applied to the puzzle of ageing. It is thus a generation-
specific response to midlife and bears the hallmarks of
other social problems and barriers that this cohort has

seen itself as overcoming. There is little recognition of
difficulty beyond the reach of increased self-management,
'taking control' of relationships and personal health care.
Midlife rebels, who must now rebel responsibly, also

appear to have pushed the recognition of a similar period
in the lifecourse back from that identified with crisis. If
there is a golden age to which the dream map,

rediscovered in middle age, refers, it appears not in a
transition similar to adolescence, but in the pre-teen or
latency period. If adolescence was marked by crisis and

confusion of identity, the search for a secure adult
persona and the taking up of responsibility, this is not the

case during latency. Latency, as the label suggests, is
marked by an absence of conflict. Latency is pre-sexual
and characterized by sensations of certainty and
autonomy, where identity is not cast as problematic and
relationships with others are rapidly being outgrown.
A very different response to ageing can be found in a

second manual: Deepak Chopra's (1993) Ageless Body,
Timeless Mind: a Practical Alternative to Growing Old. Here
the problems of ageing are addressed in a characteristic

and, as its title suggests, iconoclastic manner. It is
claimed, through an amalgam of ideas including social
constructionism, quantum physics and traditional Hindu
meditation and philosophy, that ageing is essentially

illusory. The logic of this argument is approximately as
follows. An experience of ageless body and timeless mind
can be achieved because our notions of ageing are mental

and social products and are therefore mutable. Further,
the link between mind and body is far greater than
Western dualism would suggest, a point which draws

support from the indeterminacy of substantive
boundaries between objects and energies discovered by

contemporary physics. A link between the mutability of
social, psychological and physical ageing is thereby
established within the internal logic of Chopra's position.
Meditation, in conjunction with healthy eating and
exercise, is proposed as an appropriate technology with

which to influence this mind-body continuum as ageing
arises from the experience of stress and a habitual
reliance on interpretations rooted in the past. These are

thought to cause mutations in our molecular structures
that lead to the breakdown and entropic decay of

embodied/mental processes. Openness to immediate
experience and acceptance of events as they unfold are
pitted against a tendency to store feelings as a form of
'emotional debt'. Insofar as the former can be enhanced
and the latter reduced, ageing can be progressively

abolished. The reader is thereby invited to become a
pioneer in a new country where death and old age cease
to exist and are, it is claimed, not even entertained as

possibilities.
According to this perspective, age can be eliminated
through the maintenance of an eternal present. The

argument is sustained through a blurring of previously
discrete discourses, such as physics, health care and
Eastern philosophy, a characteristic that some authors
(Crook et al. 1992) have identified with postmodernity.

The appropriate technology of the self is based on
meditation. There is no golden age from which midlife
gains its character, because age is, at root, a diversion. In

this respect Chopra's manual also includes aspects that
Katz (1996) has identified as a pre-modern attitude to
age. Age is conceived not as a stage that each person has
to go through, but rather as a state of being. Wisdom, for
example, can be a property of extraordinary people such
as Jesus or Gotama, the Bodhisattva, regardless of their
chronological age. There is little room in this perspective

for an apprehension of personal history and continuity,
which are seen as emotional debts clogging up the psychic
economy.
Gail Sheehy's (1996) New Passages: Mapping Your Life
across Time is perhaps the popular book most often cited
in the human interest columns of broadsheet newspapers.

It has been quoted in connection with 'boomer' activities,
positive ageing and life counselling. She is cited (Guardian
4 January 1997) as deciding in her mid-fifties to reshape

her body through jogging, yoga and aerobics, which she
found to be empowering, and stating that others should
follow suit by similarly 'reinventing themselves both
physically and psychologically'. Sheehy postulates a new

division of the adult lifecourse into provisional adulthood
(18-30 years), followed by first (30-45) and second (45-
85 plus) adulthoods. This later period is further broken
down into an 'age of mastery' between 45 and 65 and an

'age of integrity' from 65 until death. Death itself is only
alluded to, however. The rollcall of new age-stages
continues on to include the sage seventies, uninhibited
eighties, noble nineties and celebratory centenarians.

And, while Sheehy cannot resist a gung-ho, can-do
labelling of each adult decade (tryout twenties, turbulent
thirties, flourishing forties, flaming fifties and serene

sixties complete the set), her work includes a substantive
attempt to reconcile cohort experience and the repeated
challenges thrown up by the human life cycle. In so doing,

she unpeels progress through various stages from the
particular population characteristics and historical

circumstances of any one group of adults. According to
this view, each generation, identified by reference to the
dominant political era in which it reached late
teens/young adulthood, collects distinctive clusters of
values which are then carried throughout the rest of adult

life. However, it does greater justice to Sheehy's model if
these values are thought of as something approaching
guiding principles or core aspirations rather than fixed

forms of behaviour. Fixity, as it appears in her 'new map
of adult life', is an 'inner' experience that remains 'true to

stage'. Sheehy's model would contextualize manuals such
as Lambley's (1995) as an exemplar of one cohort's
negotiation of the lifecourse.
Sheehy pays approximately equal attention to the
contemporary lifecourse as experienced by men and

women, from which women emerge as the most adaptive.
In midlife, for example, Sheehy's pioneering and postwar

'liberated generation' of women appear to have gained in
redefining their social relations. This is a group described
as sleek, alcohol-free and successful in career, flicking
through the pages of the best relationship guide.

However, she is scathing of attempts to deny the
existence of a biological clock and the expectation that
medico-technical fixes can be found should motherhood
have been postponed beyond peri-menopause. The

menopause itself, however, should be planned, just as one
plans pregnancy. Men of this generation, however, appear
as ruefully contemplating a series of illusory vanities

concerning sexual performance and economic failure. A
solution is to be found in the 'sexual diamond', a recycling
of Guttman's (1975, 1987) observations on role reversals
in later life. Men, it appears, need to become connected to
emotional intimacy with partners and offspring.
It is worth noting that this analysis also finds
revitalization in a rediscovery of earlier life stages, and

again parallels are drawn with preadolescence. Later life
is marked by a rediscovery of 'zest'. This follows the

passage through the biological and social menopause and,
it is suggested, leads to a rediscovery of the 'wild girl's'
feisty 'seeker-self' that existed before periods and other
intimations of adult sexuality had begun.
While Sheehy's mapping of the adult lifecourse is
upbeat and internally convincing, it is drawn from a
relatively restricted social grouping. Her British examples

almost exclusively emerge from dinner-party
conversation and interviews with what might be
historically located as 'New Labour' media professionals

and executives. Her US sampling consists of a
questionnaire survey of 'professional women and men', a

Family Circle reader's panel and a survey published in
New Woman magazine. While she is aware of the socio-

economic bias that her samples include, this is justified
because it is claimed that these groups break new ground
and set new norms for her vision of an ageing lifestyle.
Sheehy associates 1990s midlife with mastery: this is

identified as a process of psychological development of
the self, rather than the socially sanctioned control that
Neugarten identified in the 1950s and 1960s. She also
identifies successful ageing as being resonant with other

life phases, most notably pre-adolescence. She unpeels
attitudes to ageing from cohort experience and identifies
each cohort as having a particularized notion of what

success in later life might mean. However, these notions
are set in adolescence, reflecting her favourable citation
of Erikson's model of identity formation. Their fixity

within the lifecourse as described by Sheehy means that
each of the challenges that the ageing individual must

meet are interpreted within the framework of that
particular and historically determined viewpoint.
MIDLIFESTYLE AS A SURFACE
Each of the manuals outlined above promotes a
particular view of ageing and suggests strategies for
midlife and beyond. They map out lifestyle narratives
which place varying emphasis on the importance of the
here and now, the role of experience, the possibilities for
recombination and change. Chopra, for example,
advocates the evacuation of the past and the tuning of

consciousness to the immediate present. Lambley and
Sheehy contain a mixture of exhortations including the
continuation of strategies that have been learned at

earlier phases of life, adapted to novel sociocultural
conditions. The latter two authors also locate a golden
age, where autonomy was experienced and dream maps

were formed, in preadolescence. This is strikingly
different from the most approximate life stage chosen by
a preceding cohort of writers, who had drawn parallels

between transition and challenges to identity in
adolescence and those occurring in midlife itself. It would
seem that Featherstone and Hepworth's (1989) 'youthful
self', hidden behind their mask of ageing, has now been

given an age. However, in these manuals, it is an age of
rediscovered expression, freed of the cares and
responsibilities associated with adult identity. The

manual writers describe mature adulthood in utopian
terms. There is a shedding of old responsibilities and an

opening of reconstructed, rediscovered and at the same
time more authentic identity. It does not reflect the
struggle with the body that is characteristic of
postmodern theorizing on age, and neither does it reflect
the elements of resistance to social stereotyping and
personal fragmentation that can be found within the
psychodynamic tradition. There is no place in these
manuals for disconcertingly changed priorities or
intimations of limit and mortality.
It was argued earlier that many of the questions

surrounding midlife identity concerned social spaces that
are created and maintained inter-subjectively and in
which different versions of ageing could be played out.
The formulation of midlife as crisis was, for example,
rooted in a construction of old age that was
intersubjectively real and related to issues of production
and reproduction. Members of society tacitly agreed on a
common-sense view of the mature lifecourse, the place of
midlife rebellion and a pattern for an aged identity
beyond it. The landscape was relatively fixed and the
expected route mapped out. A paradox existed, in that
people were expected to rebel against the next phase of
adulthood even though the rebellion itself constituted a
form of conformity.
In manuals for the new millenium, responsible

rebellion has been transmuted into a means of continuing
established patterns of identity management. There is

little emphasis placed on the intersubjective insofar as it
forms a glue for social relationships and agreed social
meanings. It is clear, however, that the authors assume an
almost self-evident rapport between their audience and

their reconstructions of the lifecourse. Their reports are
at some level believable.
What, then, is the intersubjective glue, the social

understanding of what the world is like, that holds these
narratives, these performances, together? First, there is a
strong element of rejection of the traditional, age-staged,

lifecourse. This is the element of rebellion. However,
rather than moving on, either to a role with reduced

status or to an increasingly individuated inner self, the
map contains strong elements of cohesion around either a

continuation of the present or the rediscovery of a golden
age. Second, there is a marked absence of the social, both
in the sense of relatedness to other people and in an
unwillingness to include socioeconomic factors that might
facilitate or impede the adoption of a midlifestyle. This

has been replaced by an individualized self, who may
meet with like-minded others who themselves become
props to the identity being constructed. Third, the

manuals reflect the now familiar perspective that the
personal past can be used to rebuild the self for current
purposes, or under certain conditions should be rejected

altogether. This position tends to evacuate personal
history and continuity as contents of the self, although it
appears that the manuals retain the continuous

application of processes of self-presentation learned at
other stages of the lifecourse. These points tend to
reinforce adaptation to the essentially episodic and
indeterminate social environments described by Giddens

(1991) and Bauman (1995), and make the manuals an
example of a postmodern technology of the self.
However, there is at least one area in which these
manuals differ from the postmodern pattern. Each relies

heavily on the power of personal agency, of an act of will
that keeps a mature identity on the road. The problem is
not seen to lie in the perceptions of others. For Hepworth
(1991) the problem lay in the fact that the body is the
symbol that external observers take to signify personal
identity, and, as identity consists of an accretion of social
discourses and attributions, influences negatively any

sense of self. Thus, 'The self is only a looking glass self and
as such is only accessible to us through the eyes of others'
(Hepworth 1991: 96). For the 'pioneers' identified by

Sheehy, Chopra and Lambley, this is not the issue. The
issue is finding the personal will to reinvent oneself. And

reinvent oneself in a way that still maintains the parts of
the self which are wanted on the voyage.
So the intersubjective glue that binds the new midlife
story together is, paradoxically, a denial of the
intersubjective and a fetishization of an autonomous and

self-creating self. Narrative approaches are valuable in
this context because they supply the tools and an
ideological justification for such an enterprise. They
recognize the past while making it docile, subservient to

current preoccupations and the creation of believable
spaces in which to perform new identities. The identities
which are created do not, however, appear to act
primarily as a bridge to the social world, as was the case

for the persona. They have adopted the protective role of
the persona in the sense that midlife attitudes and
strategies are sustained, but appear to have dropped its

connective function to a wider social world. We are left
with an internal construction about what midlifestyle
might be in a social world, which has been substituted for

a genuinely intersubjective and mutually constructed
social environment. In this, the view of ageing, or of

choosing not to age, as an act of will has taken on a life of
its own.
This combination of attitudes to the past, the social
and fixed age-expectations has led to a particular
mutation of social masking and the relationship between

the inner and outer psychological worlds. The protective
performance of identity relies heavily on its own inner
logic to stay cohesive and believable. Believability is
largely defined in terms of the internal coherence of the
stories that people tell themselves. Social connection is
underplayed or used as a negative point of reference. This
reliance on an inner logic for social conduct means that

performances in social milieux can be believed to be true,
while avoiding contact with possibly disturbing and
disruptive external information. If this form of

masquerade is typical at this life phase, then it constitutes
a powerful means of negotiating the tension between
increasing certainty and increasing uncertainty that

characterizes midlife. In response to the uncertainties of
contemporary living, one constructs a more certain

personal narrative that holds social episodes and props to
identity together within a cohesive storyline. This
narrative may draw on existing social metaphors of crisis,
transition or midlifestyle. Other sources of certainty are,
however, less easily explained. Such strategies are

achieved at a considerable long-term cost if their reliance
on cohesion through the manipulation of surfaces and the
likelihood that a particular narrative will be sustained

fails to connect with the certainties of bodily change, a
finite existence and deeper forms of psycho-social

integration. At one level such strategies constitute a
denial of ageing and things associated with it: value of
memory, learning from experience, existential finitude. At
another they constitute a practical strategy, given the
resources to back it up. They are a step into the void left
by the blurring of the lifecourse.
6
Meaning and forgetting
BEYOND MIDLIFESTYLE
While midlifestyle addresses the surfaces of identity,
it begs the question of what lies beyond. The mature
imagination must, in other words, maintain a convincing

narrative of self in a continuous present and find a place
for other, possibly more disturbing, aspects of the ageing

self as well.
Mature identity has, then, to negotiate two principal
processes, one which has been emphasized by broadly
modernist interpreters of the lifecourse and another

drawn from postmodern thinking. The modernists
prioritize the view that while there is a drive towards the
expansion of the self in later life, aspects that cannot be

legitimately expressed are protected from an inhospitable
environment. They are thus hidden from public view and

in some instances from personal awareness. The
psychodynamic approach to identity would be an
example of this way of thinking. The postmodern

interpretation emphasizes the negotiation of multiplicity
and the opportunities that many different social
constructions of identity can create. Later life consists of

the construction of narratives which meet identity needs
in the here and now, a process which is limited primarily
by bodily ageing.
The view taken here is that both interpretations can
be used to give shape to mature identity. People in

maturity have, in other words, to negotiate multiple
options for identity performance and find some way of
dealing with aspects of their personality, and potential

and existential needs, which cannot find expression in
environments that are diverse yet are inevitably
assumptive realities, with attendant opacities and taboos
around ageing. Contemporary society appears to hold

within it a capacity for ever-widening narrative sources
for self-identity which are increasingly disembedded from

their original contexts and attendant limitations. This can
be seen in the changing interpretation of midlife from a
period of crisis brought on by a lack of fit between
personal desires and a fixed series of social expectations
to a period of personal maintenance through continued

midlifestylism. The history of an acceptable midlife has
thus moved from using a metaphor of crisis to using one
of transition and finally to self-narration. Midlifestylism,

as the latest in this line, is dissimilar to other notions of
personal renewal provoked at this point in the lifecourse,
such as individuation (Jung 1933a) and

gerotranscendence (Tomstam 1996). Individuation, for
example, posits the development of characteristically

different psychological processes and priorities beyond
midlife from those that have dominated earlier life
phases. A characteristic of the 'new' identities to be found
in the midlife manuals and cultural identity statements
outlined in Chapter 5 is their tendency to reconstitute the

processes and priorities of earlier life phases to make
sense of the demands of maturity itself. This may take the
form of extending the life of strategies from younger

adulthood to new challenges or drawing an analogy with
a period prior to adulthood proper. While appearing to

have similarities with the mainstream psychoanalytic
preoccupation with the power of past, and in particular
childhood events, such similarities are on closer
examination superficial. A point of difference from
psychoanalytic thinking is that the notion of a real and

determining past has been ejected, in favour of a past that
can be reinvented and used metaphorically. This works in
favour of the continuation of patterns which, while

harking back to, for example, pre-adolescence, do so in
order to describe the continued use of stratagems and
attitudes of the early-middle phases of adult life.
This kind of identity conforms to Bauman's
description of a 'world in which the art of forgetting is an
asset no less, if no more than the art of memorising, in
which forgetting rather than learning is the condition of

continuous fitness ... boasting a lifelong guarantee only
thanks to that wondrous ability of endless self-effacing'
(Bauman 1997: 25).
An implication of Bauman's description of

postmodern identity is that the experience of self
approximates a videotape, rather than, for example, a
family photo album. The former can be continually erased
and recorded, whereas the latter is characteristically
organized longitudinally and maintains images over time.
Bauman argues that a casualty of the 'videotaping'

approach to identity is that it breaks the link between
cause and effect and in so doing insulates people from
responsibility for their past actions. This he sees as a

consequence of the episodic nature of contemporary
culture. Viewed from a lifecourse and psychodynamic
perspective, it could also be argued that active adoption

of a lifestyle based on these premises supplies a
mechanism for not connecting with personal causes and
effects. It provides a mechanism for escaping the

perception of existence as a temporal, longitudinal
phenomenon, and the mortality that those trends would
imply.
An additional characteristic of extended midlife can

be identified in its focus on the power of a personal will,
independent of social realities. Self-invention has become
the socially agreed way of negotiating the lifecourse, yet
one that simultaneously denies the fact that social

agreement has anything to do with the process of
recreating the self. In other words, the socially accepted
common-sense that binds this narrative of self-creation
together is paradoxically one that rests on eclipsing

socially legitimized forms of identity as an explanation.
The power of the social only really appears in a negative
relationship to the self, in a rebellious stance against the

fixed social construction of life stages. The
intersubjectively valid assumption that holds these views
of social identity together is therefore based on a

negative, a denial of their social nature and a denial of
what is unacceptable to that newly created reality.
Taken together, these characteristics fill out a new

legitimacy for midlife and beyond: that the self can be
continuously reinvented, in the process of which aspects
of maturity that are negatively valued can be avoided.
Social slights and contradictions need not form barriers to

this self-contained project of personal invention. It is
partly this process, with its elements of creative invention
and self-deception, that makes the conflation of self and
surface so difficult to distinguish in these identity

statements and stories. They appear to be describing an
expansive and liberating fulfilment of the self, while really
only describing another form of social conformity. In
appearing to deny the adoption of a social mask, they

eclipse the ways in which the self has become mistaken
for, has become for all intents and purposes, a
masquerade. Identity and masquerade inhabit the same

conscious space and consequently selfhood appears as a
series of surfaces, and, on first examination, that is all
there is to it. The act of masking has largely lost its role as
a bridge between inner and outer worlds. Instead, it is
believed that a mature identity can somehow exist

independently of social and ageing processes, even
though it is the very existence of these processes that has
made the masking necessary in the first place. The result
is that midlifestyle subsists on its own internal logic and
as long as that internal logic is not broken, it does not

need to come into serious contact with realities that lie
outside it.
Midlifestyle solves the problem posed by masquerade
in the sense that content and purpose are supplied to the

surface layering of the psyche. Its logic addresses the
problem of how to tie the episodic and fragmentary
processes of the social world into a cohesive narrative. It
supplies, to paraphrase McAdams (1993), stories that can

be lived by. It also provides a means of overcoming
negative social stereotyping of later life associated with
dependency and decline. The emphasis placed on

personal will, narratives in the service of the present and
control, denies such stereotypes a purchase on the new
identities being created and recycled.
Midlifestylism does not solve the problem of what lies
behind the mask, however, as it is strongly bounded by its
own terms of reference. The relationship to any deeper

logic of the psyche is not addressed. It is trapped in a logic
of its own making, beyond which it cannot see, and
therefore lives within a constantly changing yet ever
present sense of the immediate. Wider questions of

lifecourse adaptation and change are avoided.
As ageing progresses, the psyche becomes layered in
terms of the hidden and the surface in a particular way

(see Figure 6.1). Some things become hidden and some
surface because circumstances, the balance achieved
between the internal logic of the masque and
intersubjective reality, define what can and what cannot
find a legitimate voice. What cannot be voiced gets

hidden, but is not necessarily driven into the unconscious.
Rather, it is possible that an outer layer can have one logic
which is only tangentially related to the deeper internal

logic of the psyche. This deeper logic contains possibilities
for self-expression, which emerge as the lifecourse
continues, but may be difficult to display publicly.
Figure 6.1 Hidden and surface logics.
BEYOND SELF-NARRATION
There are a number of instances in the conception of

ageing as selfnarration that should give us pause for
thought. First, there is a distinct resonance, a family
resemblance, between the characteristics of the midlife

identity described in popular culture and life manuals,
and those descriptions of narcissistic pathology found in

the psychodynamic work of King (1980) and Kleinberg
(1995). Both describe a preoccupation with the value of
oneself as an individual, a devaluation of the social and of
relatedness to others, plus a tendency to perceive others

and the past as props in the service of immediate
personal need.
Second, there is almost no mention of the two great

contemporary fears associated with ageing, namely
mental incapacity and bodily frailty. Although the
prevalence of dementia, for example, which Kitwood

(1997) estimates to be in the region of seven per cent for
the population over 65, is low, it has come to dominate
everyday fears associated with ageing. Dementia is in

many ways a metaphor for the erosion of the mask, an
inability to control or even remember the presentation of
self for long periods. It is a process that requires grieving
of social losses during periods of lucidity and active
support in the maintenance of personal narrative
(Cheston 1996; Mills 1997). In this sense it stands for the
death of the masquerade project. The ageing body and its
betrayals (Featherstone and Hepworth 1989; Turner
1995) has, as has been argued earlier, become a
harbinger of postmodern despair. Both are

disproportionately associated with adult ageing, yet
neither features in the narratives of later life as a midlife
extension.
Third, while proponents of the narrative approach,
most notably McAdams (1993), have shown an interest in
the creation of life-stories in mature adulthood, little is
said beyond midlife narrative formations. In The Stories
We Live By, for example, McAdams concludes with a
three-page epilogue in which late-life issues are described
as post-mythic. Eriksonian notions of integrity and life

review are then employed to make sense of experience
beyond the reach of midlifestyle. It would seem from this
that the narratives, personae and masquerades arising in
midlife cannot extend their reach indefinitely.
ALTERNATIVE LOGICS OF LATER LIFE
What might be the alternative logic for later life that
is obscured by the masque of midlife narrative? What has
been made taboo? What is hidden by the new
orthodoxies? What fills out the deeper layers of the
mature psyche? In many ways the hidden would
represent the unacceptable, the shadow of the fantasy of
continued midlifestyle. Where there is agelessness, there
is also finitude. Where there is activity, there will be
reflection. Where there is separation, there will be
connection. Where there is paradox there will be
integration. Where there is immediacy there will be
attempts at coherence across the lifecourse.
Struggles to achieve a coherent psychology beneath

the mask would include the apprehension of finitude and
a simultaneous and growing awareness of connection.
These twin concerns are not discrete: they interconnect
with the past and the future, merge and separate as part
of a search for personal and wider social meaning. A
concern with the finite nature of existence has been
recognized in the writings of Jaques (1965), Jung (1931)
and McAdams (1993). It rests on the acceptance that life
will come to an end and that one must therefore begin to
look forwards as well as backwards for reference points

across the lifecourse. It is manifest in a growing curiosity
concerning the denouement of one's own life story and

refocuses attention on to sources of continuity. The
ultimate destination for finitude is death, to which the
bodily, mental and social losses associated with old age
often act as premonitions. A concern with a connection to

realities greater than the self is reflected in issues such as
generativity (Erikson, 1982), spirituality (Tomstam 1996)
and social connection (de Beauvoir 1970; Kuhn 1977).

These processes of greater connection and personal
closure also affect the perception of self, most particularly

in the relationship between the past, the future and the
present. As such they concern memory, death and
sociability, each of which provides the potential for
grounding personal experience and the lifecourse. In
terms of personal phenomenology, or self-experience,

these concerns translate into a process of looking
backwards over the lifecourse to that which has already

occurred, looking forwards to what has yet to happen and
looking at sociability in the present.
CONTINUITY AND MEMORY
As we have seen, a core element within the
psychoanalytic tradition consists of making sense of past

life. This may take the form of uncovering memories that
have been lost, which would serve to facilitate a release

from the grip of unremembered and thereby unconscious
power. It may take the form of obtaining a sense of order
in the lifecourse, as suggested by adherents to ego
psychology. In whatever guise it appears, memory has

been placed in a central position in the process of
becoming a more complete and self-directed individual.
Memory has thus become the repository for unresolved

contradictions and a source of material in using past life
to understand contemporary identity. As such, it draws

on powerful traditions within Enlightenment thought. It is
the loss of memories beyond the possibility of retrieving

them, for example, that John Locke (1690) speculated as
being a criterion for the non-attribution of personal

responsibility and discontinuity of personhood. It is
closely associated with contemporary fears of ageing and
the supposed link between ageing and dementia. If one

cannot remember, in other words, how far can one be
thought of as the same, and therefore accountable,
person?
The power of life review and reminiscence has
become a central element in therapeutic work in later life

largely because of this belief in the therapeutic value of
memory. However, such opinions were not immediately

accepted within gerontology. Erikson's (1963) early
remarks about integrating self-experience through the
acceptance of 'one's own and only life cycle' and the
people who are significant to it took on a radical aspect

relative to the dominant perspective of his day. From
being seen as a tendency to talk about earlier experience
as 'living in the past’, as not, in other words, keeping up
with the demands of modernist notions of progress and

productivity in the present, it has come to characterize
the technology for personal integration in later life. Thus,
by 1986, Coleman felt able to write that 'An almost totally

negative view to talking or thinking about the past has
been replaced by a much more positive one' (Coleman
1986: 41).
A number of writers on life review (Butler 1963),
autobiographical memory (Salaman 1970; Conway 1990)
and group reminiscence behaviour (Coleman 1986) have

suggested that the recall of memories from across the
lifecourse is a naturally occurring, if not always a
welcome, aspect of later life. Dittman-Kohli (1991) has

concluded that identities may exist on a different
temporal basis in earlier and later adulthood, as older
people emphasize continuity with the past more than

younger people do, together with a focus on maintenance
of identity rather than change and development. This may
result in a more realistic sense of self and lowered

expectations in later life. In a review of identity
management, again by Coleman (1996), it is suggested
that 'A satisfactory life story guarantees meaning so long
as the link with the past is maintained.' Both the retrieval

of memory and a sense of connection between past events
and current experience is therefore required for the
construction of a meaningful personal narrative. To be
convincing, in other words, narratives need to be
grounded longitudinally. However, Coleman (1996: 102)

goes on to say: 'There is evidence that many old people in
our society lack the encouragement they need and the
audience to whom to tell their story.' This latter point
indicates that spontaneous reminiscence may often be

inhibited or driven under cover.
When memory finds a public space, it is often difficult
to distinguish between the banal and the profound.
Moody (1988) regrets the bowdlerization of life review.

He claims that it has come to be used as a means of
bolstering cultural myths about the past and the
construction of old age that owes more to the

psychological needs of the younger listener or collator
than the reviewers themselves. It is suggested that the
use of reminiscence technology in everything from school

projects to residential care has not only become a
dominant institiutional means of negotiating

intergenerational relationships, but also promotes an
underlying message that the present is better than the

past and society knows more now than was known then.
The power of the past to disturb is thereby simplified and
domesticated according to the needs of a dominant and

mostly younger age group.
A second, and less utopian, positioning of memory
can be found in a growing literature on the relationship
between memory and post-traumatic stress in later life

(Thompson 1997; Hunt et al. 1997). Memories emerging
in later life of the holocaust (Hassan 1997), warfare and
imprisonment (Robbins 1997) and political violence

(Gibson 1997) powerfully express the enduring power of
personal traumatic experience of historical events. It
would not be possible to understand the behaviour and

accompanying psychological pain of these survivors were
it not for the legitimizing power of memory and a

groundedness in actual historical events.
The association between memory and trauma is, of

course, a key component of the psychoanalytic
understanding of repression, self-deception and cure.

Conway (1990) notes that, according to Freudian
interpretation, childhood amnesia arises in response to

emotional episodes which an adult would find
threatening and disturbing. Such memories are screened
by the remembrance of less disturbing events and are
thereby hidden from direct retrieval. The original
sequence and content of events slides beneath a different
set of memories in just the same way as words disguise,
yet are linked by association to alternative meanings in

the psychoanalytic discourse. Current identities are
fashioned less, it would seem, from forgetting than from

an inability to forget, plus the unconscious pull exerted by
memories that have been repressed. Genuineness,
according to this therapeutic discourse, arises through an
apprehension of the correct, i.e. the original, ordering of

events and their contents. The message in the memory is
then understood and individuals are able to assume the
role of an active agent, with increased control over their
own destiny.
However, Vialdi (1996) has argued that trauma can
significantly disrupt notions of the truth and of memory

such that it is no longer clear whether memories reflect
personally experienced events, the experience of others

or fantasy. Through her examination of family secrets, she
suggests that adult children may unconsciously act out
traumatic parental experiences which have not been

verbally conveyed to them for cultural or political
reasons. She takes the case of a young woman who
repeats behaviours that stem from her mother's past as a
political activist who experienced the murder of her
relatives, torture and imprisonment. The daughter
developed a narrative to explain the gaps and elisions in

her family history, which, 'Instead of helping to uncover
and dissolve the fantasy, furnishes it with material, and
works to obscure the distinction between what belongs to

the parent's real experience and what to the child's
fantasy' (Vialdi 1996: 36). The adult child's 'memories'
become a confusing mixture of actual and imagined

events, as 'what returns to haunt the child belongs to
somebody else's unconscious'. It no longer becomes
possible to distinguish between the reality of the adult

child's experience and the residues of that of significant
others. The notion of secrets in the family is not new to
the psychodynamic approach, and can be found in the
work of Pincus and Dare (1978). These authors suggest

that unless the chain is broken by a member questioning
his or her family's assumptive world, unspoken trauma
experienced by earlier generations can inhibit and distort,
and lead to the transgenerational repetition of suffering.
Arguments on the contested status of remembering
have been extended by exponents of the cultural study of
memory (King 1996; Fairhurst 1997). Here there is a
marked disregard for original veracity. Instead, a

perspective has been adopted that studies the contexts
within which memories are produced and the relatedness
of content to the context of production. It is not memory

itself which is of interest as much as the construction of
certain statements and uses of language that denote
certain utterances as being labelled as memory. Their

interest, however, lies not in how certain memories can
be recalled depending upon how the remembering
individual judges them to be appropriate, what Gubrium

(1993) has called 'communicated lives', as much as in
how they arise in language and how that status is
conferred. Thus, psychoanalysis is construed by Burman
(1996) as being a repository of meanings around

narratives of the past and an arbiter of what counts as
'real' memory. Accordingly, traumas are traumatic
because they have not been assimilated into a meaningful

discourse, rather than the emotional disturbance that
surrounded events that occurred and were then
repressed.
Memories in this tradition are described in the
language of text and surface. They not only become the
plaything of whatever narrative is currently being

performed in the present, they are bleached of time and
personal history. They are words labelled memory, rather

than memory represented in words. Memory, in other
words, without a notion of the past.
The question of the veracity of recovered memory has

been set in sharper contrast by the debate on false
memory syndrome (Burman 1996; Crews 1997). Many
contemporary psychotherapists might maintain that the
strict historical truth of an event is less important to the

therapeutic process in the here and now than the
patient's belief that it is true. Attention has moved away

from the classical psychoanalytic, and archaeological,
model of insight through recovery of buried memories, to
an understanding of the patient's view of the world.

Remembered events can, in other words, become part of a
believable narrative and a personal guide for acting in
and interpreting the world without being objectively true.
What one has to work with, as a therapist, are those
guiding principles by which an individual lives his or her
life and whether, in the process of therapy, suffering can
be reduced and happiness increased.
These assumptions not only obscure the relationship
between accurate recollection of the past and the

selective aims of the present (Bollas 1989); they have a
potentially explosive effect once they travel beyond the
psychodynamic session and impact on everyday
relationships with others. Examples of the need for a

grounding beyond internal logic can be found in the use of
memory in the courts, in statutory helping agencies and
as they affect other people still living. Here, it makes
sense to distinguish between trauma that is covered up

and fantasy which is taken for real. In contemporary
psychotherapy, the difference between truth or falsity
may be incidental. This is not the case in social settings

which include points of law and the conduct of others. In
the latter case, self-narratives may be recast as untruths
unless they are sufficiently rooted in externally verifiable

events, and the courtroom is a distinctly un-postmodern
environment.
Oral memory of actual historical events can also serve
a function of cultural resistance to dominant narratives.

This point has been vividly expressed by Corrigan and
Leonard (1981), who describe how the memories of older

people can inform community and social work
understanding of histories of struggle within a locality.
These memories are often associated with particular
landmarks, or the sites of landmarks that have since

disappeared (Dittman-Kholi 1991). Gellhom (1997: 6)
describes, for example, how memories of the British
miners' strike struggle for survival against an official

attitude of hostility and erasure. 'We all know about
history being re-written, but in Wales, history has been
turfed over. This place had a mine on every block, it was
solid coal: now there's no sign there were ever mines

here. It's a most extraordinary example of how history
can be erased.' Under such circumstances, memories of
the miners' struggle and community spirit may have to

rely on communication across generations, a reservoir of
collective tactics and strategies that are unlikely to be
recorded by official rewritings of the heritage industry.
The value of memory is also reflected in studies of
migration (Amin and Patel 1998; Blakemore 1998;
Comley 1998) where it can have a connective function

between generations and sustain 'unofficial' narratives.
There is a connection here with the political projects
discussed by Andrews (1991) and de Beauvoir (1970)

(see Chapter 4) in the suggestion that meaning is given to
existence through a continued devotion to social
emancipation. Men and women who 'Have been and are

still fully involved with living, knowing that even after
they die, the fights in which they have been engaged will
persist', are, according to this perspective, 'Unlike many

others of their age who feel they no longer belong to
society, [as] they continue to have a strong purpose in life,
a reason for living' (Andrews 1991: 207). Here, the notion
of a continued interaction between past and present

commitment valorizes memory, in a way that a focus on
its relative and insubstantial qualities does not.
Within psychodynamic and social action approaches
to identity, here and now relationships resonate with
memories and the past. There is an emphasis on
continuity and using the past as a guide to understanding
the present. Further, memories of experienced events are
privileged over remembered dreams, television
programmes, novels and other forms of fantasy activity.
The relationship between past and present, hidden and
apparent, and thus the territory of the masque, is seen as
becoming increasingly permeable as it is understood by
the active subject. Memory is important within these
traditions, but is not necessarily taken to be accurate.
Rather, memory is seen as containing truths which are
often hidden and whose recovery can lead to an increased
realism in everyday life. Memories are valued as a link to
the past, and value the experience of longevity. Within the
context of postmodernity, however, the value of memory
is unclear. It is flattened and used for different purposes,
and has no existence outside the coercive force of an
unstable present. While memories in mature adulthood
can be valued, then, they are not generally so. They
emerge, but have no public voice. They exist covertly.
MORTAL FINITUDE
While it can be seen from the above discussion that
memory is a contested subject, it can, under certain
conditions, represent a form of connectivity. This
connectivity looks back, over the shoulder. Its power lies
in lessons that can be learned and the undertow of
repressed contents. In mature adulthood, the subject

must also find a connectivity by looking forwards, which
in this lifecourse context means the apprehension of a
finite existence. As authors such as Lynch (1997) point
out, death is relatively absent from contemporary
experience. Most people's contact with it is either abrupt

and privatized, or mediated by a bowdlerizing and
sensational popular culture. It is not a welcome guest
unless it is masked in the conceits of murder mystery or
the horror movie. By contrast, the apprehension of death
as the ultimate expression of finitude has been the special
concern of existential psychotherapists, of whom Yalom
(1980) and Frankl (1969) are key.
Within the existential tradition the expression of
choice and personal freedom is tempered by the
simultaneous experience of limitation. This is not
necessarily, as Maquarrie (1973: 148) puts it, 'an
observed state of affairs but the inward, existential
awareness of one's own being as a fact that is to be

accepted.' One simply finds oneself in a limited, factual,
corporeal existence and has to come to terms with it as
the antidote to fantasies of unlimited possibility.

According to this perspective, it would be wrong to
understand death as simply a point of termination. It is
not relegated to the end of the story, but becomes very

much a part of the continuing experience of self. This is in
part because, whereas the beginning of the lifecourse can

be assigned a definite starting point in the past, it is
impossible to tell whether actual existence will extend as
far as our future plans or possibly beyond them. Without
apprehension that an end-point exists, it would be
difficult to gain a sense of personal existence as a whole.

The intimation of a limit to life means that things cannot
be put off indefinitely. The task that fills the time available
to personal existence is couched in terms of achieving
authenticity: 'man must decide who he will be, and more

than this, each individual must decide the question for
himself' (Maquarrie 1973: 161).
Yalom (1980) claims that while death is a core
question for existence, it is more often than not one that is
avoided both inside and outside the therapeutic situation.
He sums this up accordingly: 'Do not patients have quite

enough fear and quite enough dread without the therapist
reminding them of the grimmest of life's horrors? Why
focus on bitter and immutable reality? If the goal of

therapy is to instill hope, why evoke hope-defeating
death?' (Yalom 1980: 29). It is a view reflected in the
responses of counsellors who, while seeing issues of

bereavement as closely associated to work with older
clients, generally did not focus on the meaning of personal
mortality (Woolfe and Biggs 1997).
Against this common-sense position it is argued that

life and death are interdependent and exist
simultaneously, so that 'death whirs continuously
beneath the membrane of life', and also that death is a

fundamental source of anxiety which, if left unattended,
results in psychopathology. The positive function of an
increased awareness of death is that it jolts the individual
out of a state of immersion in everyday life. Here, Yalom
draws on Heidegger's (1926) distinction between
forgetfulness of being and mindfulness of being. It is only

in the latter state that one becomes aware of personal
authorship and responsibility and can therefore exist

authentically. This is because once finitude has been
apprehended, the purpose of existence itself can no
longer be postponed. Yalom cites a number of examples
from his therapeutic practice which illustrate the way in

which near-death experiences and group exercises that
are aimed to put participants in contact with their own
mortality can provoke a reestablished connection with

meaning and a more fulfilling existence. Classical
psychoanalysis, he argues, fails to address these questions

because it only looks backwards to past life events for
inspiration. It is therefore conceptually unsuited to
address questions that project identity into the future.
Freud's (1920) conception of Thanatos, or death instinct,
in his later work similarly fails to address the existential

meaning of finitude because, according to Yalom, he
conceived of it primarily as a will to destructiveness in

opposition to libidinal wishes towards creation, and not
as an encounter with mortality as such.
However, Yalom's approach has been criticized by
van Deurzen-Smith (1997:158) for its reliance on
technical fixes and clinical modes of practice which result
in 'a list of basic anxieties rather than... a framework for

living'. It is unclear, then, whether this version of
existential psychotherapy allows its subject to address
lifecourse problems, which, to paraphrase Jung's (1933a)

words, allow one to remain vitally alive by being ready to
die with life.
Frankl (1955) places a particular emphasis on

finitude as a spur to meaning in life. It is suggested that
temporality, the irreversible quality of the lifecourse,
'brings our patients to consciousness of their
responsibility'. One cannot undo things that have been

done, the consequences of which stay with their author.
The nature of this responsibility, responsibility for what
exactly, is not always clear in Frankl, other than that it

contributes to a search for authentic meaning.
Frankl (1955) agrees with Jung (1933a) that the
pervasive malaise of modern existence is its lack of sense
of purpose. Thus, a second consequence of finitude
appears in its implications for existential projects. If there
were no end-point to existence, there would be no

particular reason to do anything. Immortals can put
things off indefinitely, whereas mortality, and in this case
consciousness of mortality, confounds the fantasies of

infinite time and a continuous present. Awareness of
mortality, it is argued, means that we have to get up and
do something. In the doing, and reflection on doing, lies

meaning. Van Deurzen-Smith (1997) suggests that three
sources of meaning can be found in Frankl's work. These
include 'what we give to life', in terms of creative action;

'what we take from the world' through the experience of
values, the foremost of which is the opportunity to love;
and the stand taken towards 'fate' that can no longer be
changed. The notion of 'taking a stand' is seen as key to

authenticity, and distinguishes active experience of the
world from passive emersion in it. A combination of the
power of finitude, the need to take a stand and the
experience of temporality leads to Frankl's most famous
exhortation: 'the leading maxim of existential analysis
might be put thus: live as if you were living for the second
time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are
about to act now' (Frankl 1955: 75).
Thus, according to exponents of an existential
tradition in psychotherapy, an apprehension of mortality
is an essential motor for living. Out of it spring remorse,

regret and an urge to learn from mistakes. It is a core
ingredient for making sense of the lifecourse and, through

an awareness of transience, adds depth and poignancy to
the concept of lifecourse itself. To ignore or deny finitude
would therefore deny life essential meaning and purpose.
Its absence from contemporary Western culture, when

wedded to increasing existential potency as the lifecourse
progresses, strengthens its candidature as an undercover
preoccupation of the mature imagination.
SPIRIT AND TRANSCENDENCE
Intimations of mortality have traditionally been

linked to spirituality, and while this has been largely left
unaddressed within an existential tradition, it can become
a powerful source of connectivity both personally and
culturally. Spirituality and ageing have been associated by

each of the major world religions, including Christianity
(Post 1992), Judaism (Isenberg 1992) and Islamic, Hindu
and Buddhist (Thursby 1992) traditions. McFadden
(1996) notes that while ageing elicits the sort of
existential questions that religion and spirituality seek to
answer, and 76 per cent of North Americans declare that

religion is very important to them, it has not been a
question widely addressed by social gerontology. Indeed,
these meaning systems are characterized as losing their

power and contributing to an experience of difference
and distance between younger and older generations
(Marcoen 1994). The displacement of spirituality has

become a central goal of modernity, which Moody (1986)
links to a 'dual displacement of meaning' in contemporary
old age. This consists in the first place of a displacement

of leisure and, more notably, contemplation from the rest
of the lifecourse into old age and of a simultaneous
displacement of death, finitude and judgement from the
after-life into later stages of the present life. Accordingly,

the burden of life's meaning has been shifted to the end of
the lifecourse.
A key component of spirituality concerns a quest for
meaning, which McFadden (1996) associates with a
'sense of connection and integration'. He points out that
'elder wisdom, unitative states of consciousness,
transcendence and awareness of multiple realities' all

indicate the importance of spirituality as part of late-life
development. According to this view, religious
philosophies have become the road maps that guide the

lifecourse in the face of the unknown and intimations of
the numinous, as well as performing the social function of
stabilizing group behaviour.
Marcoen (1994) has noted that many people who are
in late adulthood and old age develop a relationship with
transcendent reality which becomes a core element in

their 'global personal well-being'. Existential questions
that have remained latent in other parts of the lifecourse
now arise, and it is claimed that those who have a
spiritual outlook on life are more able to prevent negative

affects drowning positive feelings, even when the
material conditions of life are deteriorating. The power of
spirituality lies, it is argued, in the belief that 'A person's
spirituality is grounded in the experience of a
transcendent relationship to something greater than
oneself' (Marcoen 1994: 527).
Elkins et al. (1988) have emphasized that spirituality
should be seen as a humanistic phenomenon

distinguished from religiosity, the participation in the
beliefs, rituals and activities of traditional religion.

According to this view, spirituality concerns whatever
one considers to be the ultimate, and may include
ecological concerns and concern for others and for the
self. An apprehension of the transcendent 'opens the

person to power of myths, metaphors, stories and insights
which characterise his or her particular spirituality'
(Marcoen 1994: 529). It can thereby become source

material around which to cohere a personal narrative.
Further, 'The relationship to a transcendent reality
guarantees that one keeps feeling loved and precious,
even when the effects of the ageing process seem to falsify

these self-perceptions. The ageing person who succeeds
in living entirely decentred, grounded in something which
is greater than himself or herself, will take the
unchangeable losses of life as they are, and will
courageously live with them, less expansive than before,
but concentrated and directed to what really counts in
life' (Marcoen 1994: 531).
Ram-Prashad (1995) has surveyed classical Indian
philosophical perspectives on ageing and spiritual

meaning. Within this tradition, the first three parts of the
adult lifecourse gain meaning by being world-oriented,

and include studenthood, householding and the stage of
the forest dweller. This third stage is almost universally
construed as a transitional period, in preparation for the
fourth and final stage of renunciation. The final stage of

life is thereby devoted to 'world-transcending
contemplation'. Renunciation is not thought of as
rejection of the sort envisaged by Western notions of
disengagement, however. It is not the denial or rejection

of life; it is the acceptance of its limited, provisional
meaning. The process of ageing can enhance 'Liberation
in the sense of freedom from the world of ordinary life

and realisation in the sense of the discovery of what the
consciousness present in that ordinary life "really" is. The
attainment of realisation is tantamount to liberation from
a life embedded in this world' (Ram-Prashad 1995: 7).
In other words, an escape from the circularity of
material desire and the round of everyday activity
characteristic of the first three stages is perceived as
being a positive advantage, allowing perception to grow

beyond the immediate, the material and the transient.
'Microcosmic meanings', or those that are embedded in
everyday existence, do, however, come to be seen as

necessary and part of being connected with a wider
meaning, if unconsciously so. For example, the role of
ritual and moral codes in everyday life is to harmonize

these activities with a cosmic order. Awareness of the
'macrocosmic' allows former life phases to be
apprehended as being circular and concern with the

material as ultimately being meaninglessness beyond
itself. This ignites a need to search out those wider
meanings through a preparedness to accept one's own life
as arbitrary and meaningless and thereby to give up

individuality as essentially fleeting and absurd. Ram-
Prashad notes that humans apprehend the spiritual at all
stages of life, but it is in old age that it becomes relevant.
Rather than being caught up in specifics, 'An old
individual finds that there are certain broad and general
features which mark life but finds too that there are no
further reasons for why they have so marked life; they

just have' (Ram-Prashad 1995: 29).
The focus on moving beyond material restraints in a

search for something greater than the self is similar to
that of Sherman and Webb's (1994) observations on
reminiscence. They note that reminiscence reveals life as

a process and a spiritual journey for some older people,
'that moves from a possessive attachment to an
identification to the physical self, significant others and

material belongings, to a view of self as a process, as
"being" rather than "having" within and as part of a larger
process'(Sherman and Webb 1994: 255).
Thus, it is suggested, through the logic of spirituality,
that the attainment of internal consistency is not enough
for lifecourse development. Specifically, there is a
yearning for some form of connection to a greater reality

than can be contained either by immersion in materiality
or by an individually cohesive narrative. This search goes
beyond the maintenance of continuity and material
activity promised by existential psychotherapy. However,
it is difficult to find a legitimized space for spirituality
within modern or postmodern readings of the lifecourse.
Both would force the expression of profound spirituality
underground. More often than not modernity has defined

itself against spirituality, which is then characterized as
superstition or as being unscientific. It has become a
casualty of an Enlightenment war against formal religion,

which when expressed is rendered pathological. The
postmodern 'anything goes' version of identity
consumption fails to distinguish between profound and

banal experience, rendering spiritual choice profoundly
banal. Its materiality and celebration of surface
expression leave little space for depth and connectivity to

something greater than self; indeed, grander narratives
have been treated with considerable suspicion.
FORMS OF CONNECTION AND SOCIABILITY
The spiritual argument that the mature imagination
brings with it an awareness and a need for meaning that
is greater than the individual is reflected in both
mainstream and marginal accounts of lifecourse
development. It is possible to read Eriksonian
generativity in this light. Erikson (1963) and Kotre (1984)
have both interpreted generativity as an interest in
establishing and guiding the next generation, the failure
of which leads to stagnation. This view links generative

life tasks to immortality, as children and grandchildren
come to be seen as an extension of the self and thus as a
source of influence and control over the termination of

the material self. Alexander et al. (1992: 425) critically
describe this process as 'A way of infusing the self into the
other with the hope that it will live on forever.' It is a

symbolic act, though not necessarily a conscious one
aimed at creating an enduring and infinite self through an
investment in the other. They argue, however, that there

is no altruism present, but a culturally specific notion of
self-perpetuation.
Woolger's (1987) accounts of the discovery of past
lives through psychotherapy can be seen as another,

though distinctly un-modern, attempt to extend the self
beyond a single lifecourse. It is argued that previous lives
leave physical and psychological traces in current

existence which need to be discovered if a patient is to
obtain relief. Here, we have the trauma model extended to
spiritual cleansing, which, by extension, will lead to
happier future lives and thereby solve the problem of
finitude.
The original psychoanalytic explanation of trauma
and repression relied heavily on sexuality. This is rarely

considered as a source of contemporary psychological
disturbance (Frosh 1991; Zaretsky 1997), and is seen as
content that is itself contextually dependent on conditions
at the time of Freud's original writings. It is, however,

possible that the overt expression of sexuality continues
to be a problem for many older adults. This is not as much
due to the unacceptable nature of such thoughts to the
individual themselves, however, as to a contemporary

culture that perceives later life as a period of asexuality
(Greer 1991). Aitman (personal communication), for
example, when asked to write a series of pamphlets on

psychological issues in later life, had proposals for copy
on sexuality in old age rejected as too contentious. At
least one training video on intimacy in residential care

construes male sexuality as primarily a nuisance to staff
and other residents (Samdersen 1994). Some of the most
cutting ageist stereotypes and popular catch phrases
(mutton dressed as lamb, dirty old man, cradle-snatcher)
have been reserved for sexuality and age. Pointon (1997:

7), in a review of sexuality and later life, suggests that
'Negative attitudes surrounding older people and
sexuality can result in the mistaken belief among older

people themselves that sex stops at sixty.' Legitimized
sexual activity, it appears, ends with that great modern
lifecourse divider, retirement. This is, of course, a modern

myth debunked by a series of studies (Masters and
Johnson 1970; Brecher 1993; Kaye 1993) which indicate
that sexual activity and desire persist into deep old age. It
is a myth, however, that can have serious consequences
not just for the expression of sexuality in general, but is
particularly threatening when it restricts access to
services established to care primarily for the young, such

as AIDS (Marshall 1997). The implication for surface and
hidden aspects of identity is that sexuality is required to
exist surreptitiously beneath an asexual masquerade. It is
a form of connection which is often unrecognized, and in
the public arena is subject to powerful sources of informal
control.
It will be recalled that within the tradition of
analytical psychology, ageing, and most notably adult
psychological maturation, is construed through the

concept of increasing individuation. It is possible to
interpret individuation as being dominated by the quest

for the internal logic of the personal psyche; a reading of
the process through the application of the techniques of
active imagination, as attempted by Weaver (1973) and
Chodorow (1997), positively encourages such a view.

This is, however, only a partial exploration of the process
as a whole. Samuels et al. (1986) suggest a social
dimension to this process that might otherwise be
overlooked. As individuation progresses, they argue, 'The

person becomes conscious in what respects he or she is
both a unique human being and, at the same time, no
more than a common man or woman' (Samuels et al.

1986: 76). So while, as Jung points out in Psychological
Types (1921), the goal of the process is the development
of the individual personality, it presupposes that this

includes and is grounded in collective relationships. The
opposition to social conformity found in Jung's mistrust of
the persona should not, in other words, preclude social
connection as an ultimate psychological goal. It is not a
shutting out of the world, but a gathering in around the

seat of personal consciousness, and in this sense is a
psychological correlate of de Beauvoir's (1970) social
action.
There are a number of ways in which increased
individuation can lead to increased sociability. According
to Samuels (1985), for example, the perception of others

does not simply include internally generated archetypes;
psychological blueprints that prefigure an understanding
of the social world. These are filled out, made into a fuller
picture, by perceptions of others as they are experienced

in direct relationships with the active subject. Others are
also, over time, increasingly perceived as separate
persons in their own right. Indeed, the increased self-

acceptance that individuation describes leads to a return
of psychological projections and thus to a perception of
others that is less cluttered by personal prejudice. An

increasing sense of dialogue between inner and outer
realities affects both internal psychological processes and
perceptions of the social world. Weaver (1973) points out
that it is increasingly possible to distinguish between the
internalized social world and one's own thoughts and

moods. An internal dialogue can then take place between
these images that have been adopted as social archetypes
and a person's own sense of self. By using the metaphors

of analytic psychology, one can make sense of a
maturational process that includes increasing distinction
between aspects of experience, so that an individual is not

swamped by emotions and prejudices, and achieves an
increased ability to connect with others as persons and
groupings in their own right.
IMPLICATIONS: FROM REFLEXIVITY TO REFLECTIVITY
This review of some of the candidates for the

essentially unexpressed, the hidden yet psychologically
alive, logics of the mature psyche has identified memory
of the past, apprehension of the future and connectivity
with the social as contested sources of personal
continuity. It suggests that one's story is not entirely one's
own and that in order to develop a mature imagination
links need to be made to something greater than the self.
This process is redolent with uncertainty, insofar as
openness to wider association requires a readiness to
accept things beyond personal control. Maturity may thus

be exhibited in an ability to tolerate such forms of
indeterminacy.
An increased permeability is also suggested between

depth and surface. In the language of the masque, this
would indicate that personae and the performance of
masquerade include elements of the hidden in their

tentative journey to connect with authentic sites for
expression. An example of permeability also exists in the
proposed connection of past, present and future; not,
however, in the service of immediate impression

management as much as in an attempt at moulding
cohesion and continuity into a sense of grounded
personal coherence. Flexibility of surface components of

identity thus comes to complement the elusive, yet
potent, logic of deeper psychological layering.
While psychoanalysis constitutes a now longstanding
method, or technology, for getting beyond appearances, it
is flawed in terms of the mature imagination insofar as
the significance of memory and future behaviours is

reduced to repetition of past and most notably childhood
experience. As an essentially modern project, the object of
mainstream psychoanalysis is to escape the past rather

than live with it. However, in ceasing to allow memory to
have a logic of its own, postmodern criticism commits an
equally brutal form of closure. In the lifecourse

manifestation of midlifestyle, for example, the personal
past and future are subject to an exercise of almost
surgical removal and forgetting. The result is a

continuous recycling of identity that is decreasingly
grounded in a reality outside itself.
There are, according to the current view, no neat

conclusions and no neat answers to what is behind the
mask. The question demands careful handling rather than

iconoclastic deconstruction and if identities are
synthetically created, questions must be asked about why
and how they work. There may be considerable
authenticity in the way people think about and experience
their constructed identities even if they are not on
grounds of their own choosing. A focus on permeability
would redirect attention to the connection of internal

logic and the intersubjectively real. They are
interdependent and symbiotic in character. There is an

internal logic to the intersubjective and an internal logic
to deeper psychological processes, which sometimes finds
expression when the two logics resonate with a
particularly hospitable social space. If this is not the case,

they run along parallel paths and can become increasingly
separate.
If a consideration of the relationship between depth
and surface suggested here requires the recognition of
the permeability of mature identities, then there is also a
change in emphasis from the reflexivity of contemporary

social identity to a consideration of the role of reflectivity.
Reflectivity includes the notion of a longitudinal

component to the construction of the self in a way that
reflexivity does not. Indeed reflexivity, as a process

intimately related to the recycling of identities in the
present, is fundamentally compromised in this respect.
Reflection, and the self-conscious creation of spaces for
reflection, is inimicable to the onward rush of immediate
social experience. It allows the active subject to stand
back from the flow and to see the pattern in events rather
than being swept along by them. It demands the ability to

tolerate disruption of the continuous procession. In this
sense, reflectivity rescues a belief that personal histories
can inform the present, or at least indicate the dangers

implicit in certain actions and positions. The past can, in
other words, be used to interpret possible futures, and
insofar as ageing constitutes a connection to past

experience and has come to occupy a similar space in the
popular imagination, the fortunes of the two processes
are closely tied together.
The rescuing of reflection allows here and now

relationships to resonate with the memories and
aspirations of participants, a process that assumes that
memories and sequences of memory largely retain their

original meanings but also merge with immediate
experience. The apprehension of continuity acts as a
guide and is made available through reflection. It is a

reality that, while being personal, is privileged over
fragments arising from dreams, television, novels and the
notion that selves can be reinvented through the neo-
psychotic processes of internal logic alone.
7
Social spaces and mature identity
THE HIDDEN, THE SURFACE AND SOCIAL SPACE
An enduring theme within this book is that the
mature imagination has, throughout different historical
periods and when seen through different social and

philosophical lenses, encountered different possibilities
for expression. The relationship between ageing and the

social spaces available to the performance of identity is,
however, a dynamic one. Attempts to fix notions of adult
ageing interact reflexively with the identities that are

their object, such that both are modified over time.
Different ideas of and policies towards ageing contribute
to the creation of a social space, a sort of arena in which
performances of identity achieve public recognition and,
in a Foucauldian (1977) sense, are legitimized.
In the case of the psychodynamic tradition, it would

appear that classical psychoanalysts first rejected serious
consideration of an intrinsic subjectivity of adulthood and
with it the possibility of fruitful work with mature adults.

There then followed a period marked by revision, in
which the reach of the psychodynamic project was
extended to include groups, such as older people, who

had previously occupied only its margins. In recent years,
classical psychoanalysis has itself all but been rejected as
an inappropriate and restrictive paradigm for such work.

It has given way to more flexible and age-sensitized forms
of therapy.
Simply using the phrase, 'possibilities for expression',

however, assumes a certain type of relationship between
personal identity and social context. This is because it is

implicitly accepted that there is some core seat of
consciousness, of selfhood, from which the social world
can be apprehended and reflected upon. This core sense
of self is itself a meeting point of the explicitly known and

the tacitly, intuitively or unconsciously felt. The degree to
which tacit, or hidden, aspects of this self can find

expression in outer as well as inner experience would
depend on the particular contexts that are available to the
performance of identity. The degree of direct expression
that takes place, the inflection or nuance given to self-
expression and in some cases the possibility of expression

at all are intimately related to the quality of the social
spaces that emerge. It is this relationship between those
self-attributes that have become core and the social

spaces that already exist or can be created which
determines whether a performed identity is experienced
as genuine or not.
The determination of the genuine is contested within
contemporary literature on identity. Within the
psychodynamic tradition, pride of place is given to the

core, the ontological seat of identity, the inner life of the
person. It is assumed that there are certain internal
priorities, which have variously been labelled drives,
desires or potentials, that take precedence when one is

theorizing the relationship between self and social space.
In other words, the psychodynamic perspective consists
of looking out from the inside. Moral authority is given to
the emerging self, struggling against the circumstances in

which it finds itself. The approach does, however, tend to
emphasize the origins of identity and underplay the social
construction of spaces in which it is performed. Other
theoretical positions, which might include symbolic

interactionism and Goffmanesque dramaturgical
approaches, appear to start from the opposite pole.
Privilege is given to the external social environment in

determining genuineness. Self-expression appears to
subsist on a terrain of discourses which determine the
degree of successful fit between the inner and the outer.

Self-expression becomes the deployment of strategies
that function to assimilate the quirky and irrational into a

socially situated self. However, this form of theorizing is
marked by a failure to distinguish substantially between
social conformity and genuine self-expression. A
postmodern solution to this problem can be seen in the
multiplication of spaces for the performance of identity

and the unpeeling of meanings from their original
significance. So, rather than the argument being that
mature adulthood is achieved through an increased

awareness of previously unexpressed parts of the self or
an adoption of predefined social stereotypes, it is argued

that memory, embodiment and locality can be consumed
to suit whatever identity statement suits immediate
circumstances. The limits to consumption, however, are
still externally defined and the question of personal
agency and its attendant concerns of responsibility and

free will, twin contributors to what is commonly
understood by genuine self-expression, has been
insubstantially sketched out.
The current argument explores the relationship
between the personal and the social in terms of the
balance that can be achieved between what is hidden and

what can be expressed. How far, in other words, can
personal experience connect with something bigger than
itself? What is the role of social reality, which is itself
bigger than the individual and creates a space for mature

identity, in the likelihood that this will happen? What
opportunities arise to reflect upon this process and
connect it to an understanding of the past and the future?

As adult identity develops, it appears that the priorities of
earlier adulthood mutate into a different and mature
form. Yet, even as this happens, social spaces are
contested by alternative and often antagonistic agendas
and the particular priorities of later life are driven
underground by those of other age groups. The
expression of this age-based antagonism is multilayered

and can occur in debates over social expenditure (Minkler
and Robertson 1991), the responses of users and workers
in social and health services (Hughes 1995), the

privileging of childhood experience in theory (Biggs
1998) and the adoption of midlifestyles (Featherstone
and Hepworth 1990).
At an individual level, tension might occur between a
desire for personal continuity and the presentation of a
cohesive narrative in the mature adult's immediate

situation. Possibilities of engaging in a relatively
unselfconscious performance of identity would be
reduced where that identity jarred with an age-structured
commonsense reality. Under such circumstances, the

deployment of social masking also takes on a an age-
specified meaning which is expressed in a particular
layering of the adult psyche. Some things have to be
hidden and some things can be expressed. Some things

become tacit in social situations and some explicit. This, it
has been suggested, can result in parallel forms of logic
which contain their own forms of intrinsic consistency. By
degrees, such layering results in an intersubjectively

determined presentation of identity which might bear
little resemblance to the dynamic of the personal, inner
world.
This understanding of the mature imagination
presents the relationship between inner and outer logics
of self-identity in a new way, posing the question of social

space in terms of the likelihood of genuine self-expression
becoming possible. Likelihood, as has been touched on in
Chapter 4, concerns the balance between the protective

and the connective qualities of a social mask. The
performance of masquerade, in other words, forms links
between the external social world and the internal
desires of the performer, while at the same time shielding

the inner life from external threat and assault. Social
masking and its performance through masquerade
become critical in the management of the boundary
between self and other, and the permeability of that

boundary reflects the possibilities latent in any one social
space available for identity performance. When the social
environment is hostile, the protective function is
emphasized and the boundary becomes fixed and rigid. If

a sympathetic social space arises, the connective function
becomes ascendant and the boundary becomes more
permeable. Another way of putting this is that under

hospitable circumstances the inner and outer logics of
mature identity are able to run together and thereby
become amenable to simultaneous and harmonious

expression. Within the language of hidden and surface,
this is about as close as one gets to a definition of a

genuine connection between personal and social realities.
This line of thought leads to consideration of the

kinds of social spaces that are available for the
development of a mature imagination, the influences on
the shapes that they take and the types of performance

that can be contained within them. In preceding chapters,
the term 'masque' has been used rather loosely to span
both the adoption of a particular persona and the
performance of masquerade, a sort of semantic arena in

which these two meanings can be contained. It has, in
other words, been used to mark out the circumference of
any one mature identity. This notion of masque is closely
related to social space as currently conceived. Masque

interacts with social space, rather like the way in which
social masking can form a bridge between the personal
and the social worlds. Whereas masque would tend to

reflect longitudinal differences in the flexibility and
content of an ageing identity, spaces refer to different
deployments, different permeabilities and different

degrees of indeterminacy, security and autonomy in the
here and now.
The social space contributes to the shaping of the

masque, but is often, and most typically, pre-existent in
social terms. It is, more often than not, already
intersubjectively formed, agreed upon by other social
actors and concrete in terms of policy, the distribution of

material resources such as income or the built
environment and the social distribution of power. The
masque, as a dynamic structuring of identity, is held in the
force field of these contingent, but prefiguring, factors.

The stronger the forces, the more fixed the relations that
take shape. Further, forces may reconfigure, leading to
the creation of different spaces and requiring the creation
of a different legitimizing masque. Changes in social

policy, professional attitudes, lifestyles and self-
definitions of ageing all contribute to the shape of age as a
social space and the performances that can emerge within

it.
In terms of likelihood, this analysis provokes certain
questions about what is hidden and what is expressed,

which voices can be heard and which voice has to be
adopted to be heard. The sort of information that is being
communicated, how genuine it is and whether it can be

built on as a basis for enduring relationships and future
plans have implications for performed identity. They also
affect the quality of communication between professional
workers and service users and information collected

through mechanisms such as quality assurance and
partnership arrangements in service systems. Attention is
focused on the durability of the spaces that are formed,
whether they can be relied upon, whether there is a space

for a mature imagination and if so what sort of space, the
degree to which it allows the possibility of a synthesis of
the masque and the hidden.
THE PSYCHODYNAMIC AND THE SOCIAL
In psychodynamic thinking, the idea that certain
spaces can in some way hold particular thoughts and
feelings has become key to understanding the

relationship between personal and social worlds. It also
follows the expansion of psychodynamic ideas from work
with individuals, through the development of therapy

groups and towards an explanation of organizational and
wider social behaviour.
Psychodynamic theory and practice have been

dedicated to the creation of containing spaces which act
as a laboratory for self-conscious reflection. The concept

of a containing space includes the notion that previously
unconscious thoughts and emotions can be experienced if

a suitably safe place is created, usually by the therapist.
This safe place then acts as a container that protects these
experiences from external threats to the psyche and
allows them to be understood more easily.
If the psychoanalytic session is a self-consciously
artificial yet specialized space for examining one-to-one
interactions, then the concept of containing space opens
the possibility that other reflective and specifically social

environments also exist.
Attempts to expand on this relationship between the

personal and the social have led writers (Rioch 1970;
Stokes 1994; Symington and Symington 1996) to draw
heavily on the now seminal work of Wilfred Bion (1961).
Bion believed that group behaviour involved three sets of

conflict: that which occurs within the individual, that
between the individual and the group and that between
the explicit task of the group and its basic assumptions.
These thoughts developed while Bion worked within the

British armed forces during the Second World War, and
first appeared in a series of essays presented to the
Tavistock Clinic between 1948 and 1951. He described a

group as being 'An aggregate of individuals all in the same
state of regression' (Bion 1961: 142).
Bion was, in other words, cautious as to the status of
feelings that emerge in group contexts. He did not claim
that somehow groups create their own cultures and
climates, but rather that this 'same state of regression'
gave rise to the fantasy that 'the group' as an autonomous

entity existed over and above the experiences of
individual members. In this sense he was both respecting
the tenet of the psychoanalytic tradition that the

individual was to be the principle focus of study and going
on to examine new and, for the time, unfamiliar territory.
The notion that a group might itself have feelings that

hold sway over its members was seen as a mistaken belief
that allowed participants to lose their individual
distinctiveness and sense of personal responsibility. To

explain social phenomena, Bion proposed that when
people meet in a group, there are in fact two groups going
on.
First, there is the 'work group'. This concerns

activities that are used to address the formal task of the
group, the reason why it is meeting, and includes
attempts to engage with explicit problem-solving. Thus, in
a therapy group, for example, 'It can always be seen that

some mental activity is directed to the solution of the
problems for which the individuals seek help' (Bion 1961:
144). Second, there is activity that is not concerned with
this principal function. Individuals hold 'basic

assumptions' about what they consciously or
unconsciously desire the group to be about, and these
assumptions often impede or actively disrupt work group

functioning. Stokes (1994) has suggested that group
meetings in which the passing of time seems not to be
recognized, external realities are ignored or denied,

where there is an absence of any real progress and where
questioning attitudes are perceived to be foolish, mad or

heretical are probably under the sway of basic
assumptions of some sort. Bion himself proposed that
groups under the influence of basic assumption thinking
characteristically take three different forms: dependency,
fight— flight and pairing. Dependency is characterized as

avoiding development through participants being 'United
in the belief that if they sit there long enough, the wise
leader will come forth with a magic cure'; fight— flight

includes the assumption that the group has 'met to
preserve itself and that this can be done only by fighting

someone or something or by running away'; in pairing it
is assumed that the group has 'met for the purposes of
reproduction, to bring forth a saviour' (Bion 1961: 24). In
each case the basic assumption, which is often tacit,
rather than being an explicit strategy, avoids engagement

with the explicit work task of the group.
In terms of the relationship between the personal and

the collective, Bion's work marks an important
recognition that group, as well as individual, behaviours
reflect unconscious psychological processes.
Psychodynamic approaches can be used not simply to

diagnose society as if it were one big patient or pathology,
as was the case with Freud's (1930) Civilization and Its
Discontents, but as a way of understanding the processes
of group behaviour. Bion's insights have been expanded

by other psychoanalytically trained workers, such as
Jaques (1955) and Menzies (1970). Both of these writers
attempted to use psychodynamic thinking to examine the

workings of organizations, rather than small groups.
Jaques (1955) proposed that social systems—including
institutions, such as businesses, hospitals or ships at sea
—acted as a defence against forms of persecutory and
depressive anxiety. They therefore protected their
members from negative feelings that might overwhelm
the performance of their original task, while also

becoming something of a hothouse for various forms of
personally threatening projections if these processes are
not recognized. The occupants of certain roles, most

notably ones centred on issues of leadership, will come to
attract negative transference and bad impulses, projected
by other members of a social system on to these key

figures. Those figures then come to contain these
attributes for the rest of the organization, allowing it to

continue working, if in a rather dysfunctional manner.
Menzies (1970), following a study of nursing within a

'general teaching hospital in London', suggested that
social systems in hospitals and other institutions can act
as defences against the anxiety of those who work within

them. Because work in hospital settings involves a large
number of potentially distressing events, such as intimate
bodily contact and functions, the anxieties of patients'
relatives, envious feelings towards the cared for and the

hopes and fears engendered by treatment itself, Menzies
argued that means of defending oneself against their
impact have become part of the institutional culture. The
logic of this way of thinking about the relationship

between the social and the personal follows the route that
certain social experiences evoke primitive (in the sense of
neonatal) emotions and fears, people seek to avoid such

situations and over time these characteristic habits of
avoidance take institutional forms. Thus, according to this
view, 'the characteristic feature of the social defence

system ... is its orientation to helping the individual avoid
the experience of anxiety, guilt, doubt and uncertainty

(Menzies 1970: 24). Paradoxically, the evolution of
institutional defences, such as the wearing of uniforms,
stereotyped professional behaviour, frequent changes of
shift and workplace, which work to distance nurses from
emotional contact with their patients, can mean that

underlying anxieties are not confronted and the system
maintains a certain level of dysfunction.
Menzies's monograph has since become key to
understanding the shaping of social systems within the

psychodynamic tradition. It has allowed a link to be made
between predominantly work-related cultures and
psychological processes, has allowed a space for the
irrational in otherwise rationalistic conceptions of

organization and has facilitated an understanding of what
Lawrence (1995) has called the 'rational madness' of
work communities. Woodhouse and Pengelly (1991)

draw extensively on it in their study on interprofessional
collaboration, Obholzer and Roberts (1994) have studied
individual and organizational stress in the human

services and Tudor and Tudor (1995) have extended an
emphasis on containing anxiety to the study of social

services. Social systems are conceived as both containing
and constituting defences against forms of anxiety that
would otherwise fragment the individual psyche and
prevent an agency from addressing its core task.
In the study of human services, it has been recognized

that the internal dynamic of any one organization is also
affected by common characteristics of the client group
being served and the professional groupings working
within it. Stokes (1994), for example, has linked Bion's

basic assumptions to the cultures of different helping
professions. He suggests that dependency is most often
associated with nursing and health professionals, fight
and flight with social work and pairing with quasi-

psychotherapeutic cultures. Mattinson and Sinclair
(1979) have expanded on the relationship between
agency culture and client group. It is suggested that

processes similar to transference and
countertransference have led to the preoccupations of
any one group of people with similar problems—such as

marital problems, instances of child abuse or forms of
mental illness or incapacity—being acted out within the

organization itself. Forms of rivalry, the avoidance of
certain difficult problems or the adoption of characteristic
styles and nuances come to mark out the culture of
agencies in a characteristic way that reflects the problems
experienced by their chosen patients or clients. This

process has been labelled 'mirroring', and it is suggested
that key conflicts and patterns are mirrored in the
agencies' own working practices that arise, yet are not

recognized as arising, from the nature of their work.
These developments within the psychodynamic
tradition have linked the social and the personal in a
particular way. Large social systems provoke and
simultaneously contain the acting out of very basic

anxieties and desires that are seen as being rooted in
individual psychological experience. It thus has a
tendency to be linear in its attribution of causality, insofar

as institutional defences, while appearing to be social and
having a life of their own, are in the final analysis reduced
to individual psychological processes. This, most notably

in the work of Menzies (1970), is also reduced to the re-
enactment of infantile defences against anxiety.
This view has been criticized by Jaques (1995: 343),

who now claims that, rather than individuals 'concocting'
organizations as a means of collusive defence, 'it is badly
organised social systems that arouse psychotic anxieties
and lead to their disturbing acting out and expression in

working relationships.' In other words, it is not that the
containing space of social organization is created to deal
with unacceptable fear and desire, but that the spaces
created in society are insufficiently caring or robust to

allow the development of non-pathological coping.
In a similar vein, Cooper (1996) has criticized the
traditional psychodynamic perspective on organizations
as being unduly functionalist, such that individuals are
seen to be psychologically well insofar as they fit the

organizational structure that they find themselves in. This
view echoes Zaretsky's (1997) critique that
psychoanalysis was once a radical, but is now a

conservative, force, and has found its niche in helping
people to cope with the stresses on identity induced by
late capitalism.
An understanding of the dynamics of social systems
has also led, in the work of Miller and Rice (1967) and of
Lawrence (1979, 1995) to a view which, while
recognizing the dynamic and often unconscious

components of social and organizational behaviour, does
not link them to childhood or exclusively individual
experience. Miller and Rice (1967) and their co-workers

(Roberts 1994a) have developed the heuristic concept of
a primary task for social systems. This is most easily
apprehended by asking: what is it that a helping agency is
set up to do, what is its stated purpose? Once a primary
task has been identified, it allows the student of
organizations to 'Explore the ordering of multiple
activities... to construct and compare different

organisational models of an enterprise' (Miller and Rice
1967: 62).
Lawrence (1977) has argued that it is possible for

different people in an organization to pursue different
primary tasks as they understand them, which helps us to
understand discrepancies between what organizational

policy says is happening and what appears to be
happening at any one time. There are clearly family
resemblances here with Bion's distinction between work

and basic assumption thinking, in the sense that priority
is, somewhat uncritically, given to formal tasks that are
deemed to progress the functioning of an institution.
Roberts attempts to clarify the role of primary task by

writing that 'The primary task relates to survival in
relation to the demands of the external environment,
while basic assumption activity is driven by the demands
of the internal environment and anxieties about

psychological survival... where there are problems with
the definition of the primary task, there are likely to be
problems with boundaries, so that instead of facilitating
task performance, they serve defensive functions'

(Roberts 1994a: 31, 35).
She addresses the relationship between basic

assumptions and primary tasks, and further engages with
external social processes, but does not clearly distinguish
between primary task and the work group. While there
may be misunderstandings over the nature of the task, it

appears that both primary task and work configure the
nature of that task as, at root, both unitary and
unproblematic. The value of the primary task is,

according to Lawrence (1979: 10), that it disperses group
mythology and an immersion in immediate experience.
'An individual who is in touch with, or holds inside
himself, a conception of primary task will be very much

involved in the here and now, but will be trying to relate it
realistically to the past and the future.' Thus, while the
conception of a primary task is problematic in the sense
of being unidirectional, it includes an attempt to join the

temporal logic of past and future to the logic of the
immediate social situation.
Each of the authors above has been active in
developing an open systems approach to examining

group processes, rather like the way in which the
psychotherapy session is used as a tool to put

intrapsychic functioning into sharper focus than in
everyday life. Here, large groups of participants examine
the influence of systems dynamics in what have come to
be called group relations conferences. Lawrence (1979:

11) has suggested that such groups make it possible to
'Hear, with the "third ear", what is taking place in the
wider society. The large group is a frame for catching

what is unconsciously taking place in society at large even
though that is not the stated preoccupation nor is life in
society the topic of discussion.' Large groups and
organizations, in other words, can act as a sort of psychic

net, catching wider social phenomena, which then
influence conduct within them. In studying group culture
one is also studying these tacit influences from wider
social processes. Lawrence (1995) has gone on to

examine what he calls 'social dreaming': that is, the
dreams held in common by members of the same agency,
business or professional group. Participants meet and
discuss their dreams from the night before;

commonalities are noted and are seen to contribute to an
understanding of otherwise unconscious social processes.
According to Lawrence, these meetings become a

container for thoughts that cannot be received elsewhere.
Meanwhile, Khaleelee and Miller (1985) have
indicated that groups can be used as 'listening posts' to

render societal phenomena an intelligible field of study.
Listening posts consist of groups of people who meet to
create a reflective space that allows them to distinguish

between ephemeral and enduring social influences on
their behaviour from wider group cultures. Greater
insight would thus be gained about tacit social
assumptions as well as overt cultural content. This

method was originally developed so that members of
organizations could listen in to assumptive realities or the
psychological climate of their workplace, but has now
been extended by Dartington (personal communication,

1997) and others, such as Palmer (personal
communication, 1998), to examine the unconscious
influence of societal rather than organizational culture. It
is as if, to paraphrase Dartington, it is no longer possible

to think of one's mood as being exclusive and personal.
Any conversation must now imply or depict a wider
context, the speaker's society, which contains tacit or

unconscious influences as well as conscious ones and can
be named through reflection and interpretation.
In the long journey from the workings of the

individual mind to the power of tacit social processes,
workers in the psychodynamic tradition have attempted
to construct an understanding of the internal dynamics of

social spaces and, on occasion, the relationship between
what goes on within these spaces, such as groups,
agencies, organizations and institutions, and wider-
ranging societal processes. These processes are not

necessarily considered to be overt cultural phenomena;
instead, attention has been focused on an emerging
dynamic between events and the tacit social assumptions
that they might represent.
It appears from this analysis that the concept of
containing space can be used to describe socially
occurring spaces, which sometimes cohere around
existing institutions and sometimes exist relatively

autonomously in the field of social experience, which
would include the concept of ageing itself. While
apprehension of these spaces, which have psychosocial as

well as material presence, is often only tacit in everyday
life, opportunities for reflective containment can also
make them explicit and available for critical analysis.
AGEING AND THE PSYCHODYNAMIC APPROACH TO SOCIAL

SYSTEMS
While listening posts and social dreaming have not, to

the author's knowledge, been used specifically with older
adults, there are some studies that indicate a particular

social dynamic between workers and older people.
Dartington (1986) has studied relations between carers

for mentally infirm elders and multidisciplinary teams,
concluding that 'professionals can bring with them
inappropriate attitudes, seeing relatives as a resource to
be trained to do better and carry on for longer, rather

than people under stress with needs of their own'
(Dartington 1986: 37). Sayers (1994) undertook in-depth
interviews with those looking after a dementing spouse at
home. She examined the defences used by workers and

carers looking after persons who are 'emotionally cut off,
regressed, anxious, disinhibited or depressed'. These
psychological states affect what carers seek from and can

use by way of professional support. Findings did not show
expected differences between men and women; instead,
coping was associated with carers who could attune

'themselves to their partner's state of mind without fear
of succumbing to it' (Sayers 1994: 133). In other cases

there was a tendency to reproduce the cut-offness
experienced by the carer in relations with the dementing
elder, such that partners were left in a state of
'incommunicado' and, it is suggested, this dynamic is also
present in service systems. Sayers draws on Biggs's

(1991) critique of case management as being an
insufficiently sensitive method of care when dealing with
the emotional dynamic of such situations. She is

concerned that managerialist techniques of care fail to
provide reflective spaces in which workers and carers

alike can examine the psychological impact of their
relationships.
The tendency for the needs and indeed presence of
older adults in social systems of care to be overlooked is
an enduring observation in this literature which may not

be completely explained by the presence of dementia.
Itzin (1986) and Biggs (1990b) have observed the

difficulties that members of age-awareness groups can
have in putting themselves in the place of older adults,
and the resistance often experienced to work with older
adults. Factors such as an irrational fear of personal

ageing, an absence and avoidance of disconfirming
experiences and the unacceptability of characteristics
associated with the second half of life have been
suggested (Biggs 1989) as contributing to a general

situation in which younger adults simply ignore elders'
thoughts, feelings and aspirations. The experience of
ageing is thus constituted as an experience of absence.
Miller (1993) and Roberts (1994b) have both

consulted to institutions in which older people lived. They
report social systems as prone to splitting and
fragmentation. In each case, there was a marked absence
of communication between different parts of the service
system and considerable antagonism between groups of
staff who considered themselves to be working with the

'good' patients or with the 'bad' ones. There is a
remarkable similarity between these two reports in that
it appeared that care for patients who were perceived as

being 'incurable' contradicted the ethos of health care
systems. The primary task of cure and its attendant
reward of optimism were perceived to be lacking in work

with some older patients. 'Good' patients were placed on
rehabilitation programmes and thereby left the system.
'Bad' ones were left on back wards and perceived as

blockages in the system, and their staff considered
themselves forgotten and unappreciated. Roberts
(1994b) attempted to negotiate a more inclusive primary
task, whereas Miller (1993) began to explore both sides of

the boundary between the institution and community.
Unfortunately, both efforts at consultation were drawn to
a premature close. Biggs (1993b) similarly observed a

fragmentation of community outreach services for older
patients and their carers, such that carers were the only
participants in a multidisciplinary consultation who
contained the need for continuity of care and held
valuable information about the gaps in service provision.
An attempt was made to assert the primacy of the active
patient as a focus for shared professional tasks. However,

the consultation was again ended somewhat prematurely
owing to wider service reorganizations.
Perhaps the most enduring and poignant record of

consultation to services for vulnerable older adults can be
found in the work of Terry (1997, 1998). Terry undertook
direct counselling with older patients and worked with

management and staff in a consultative capacity over a
number of years. As is accepted practice within this
tradition, he closely observed his own emotional
responses to the environments in which he worked as an

aid to understanding the transference and
countertransference provoked by such a culture. He
notes: 'The anguish of trying to continue an "ordinary" life

on these long stay wards when so much has gone and
when faced with so many endings and goodbyes; it is so
painful that many prefer to withdraw into passivity and
mutism' (Terry 1997: 112).
Staff 'Often split off and denied a capacity to think
about their patient's feelings in order to protect
themselves from the distress of empathising with their
patient's emotional pain' (Terry 1997: 116). The capacity

to think about feelings and contain thoughts of despair
became located in Terry. They were left with him so that
others could 'get on' with institutional life. He

increasingly fell prey to intimations of helplessness,
hypochondria and a sense of being ignored, as reflections
of the emotions experienced by the patients themselves.

Through a series of staff support groups, attempts were
made to create containers in which these feelings could
be discussed with varying degrees of success. However,

there are indications in the text that at least part of the
reaction to this intervention was to engage in the
provision of 'an exciting environment in which there
would be no space for sad feelings' (Terry 1998: 120).
This solution is reminiscent of Miller and Gwynne's

(1972) study of residential institutions for physically
handicapped adults. Two sorts of regimes were observed.
The first, referred to as warehousing, was described by
authors as a 'social death sentence', in which clients were
maintained predominantly through bodily care until
physical death actually occurred. The second, referred to

as a humanitarian or 'horticultural' culture, encouraged
engagement in challenging activity. However, staff often
set goals which took little account of clients' physical

requirements and capacities, thus creating situations of
relative failure. In both cases a rigid distinction between
'normal' and 'abnormal' adulthood was maintained,

which defended staff against putting themselves in the
position of the other.
Terry (1998) continued to consult staff through a

period in which services were privatized. He interpreted
privatization as a means through which wider health care
systems reproduce the same tendency to deny the
potentially disturbing presence of older patients. This

presence was considered incompatible with the primary
task of hope and cure so central to helping agencies, such
that when the opportunity arose patients were evacuated
from the system altogether.
The reports noted above bear witness to the heuristic
power of the concept of primary task and of looking at the
dynamic relationship between persons and systems.
However, even within these reports, there is a tendency

to hear the voices of younger professionals and a
migration away from older adults. Each of the
interventions, for example, ended up working principally

with staff groups. From a psychodynamic perspective, one
is provoked to ask where the containing space for older
and particularly vulnerable older adults might be. It is

becoming clear that in connecting the social and the
psychodynamic, these workers are discovering a complex
web of age-segregation, unthought consequences and

institutional defences which both contribute to and ask
questions of social policy as creating social space.
MATURE IDENTITY AND THE WELFARE STATE
Within the conceptual framework of containing
environments, social policy can be construed as an
attempt to shape the space in which ideas are articulated,

self-expression takes place and relationships are formed
around certain legitimised topics. The welfare state,
which for these purposes includes both health and social
care, can be seen as a place in which society attempts to
achieve some form of closure around questions of
vulnerability and incapacity. Both are related to the fears,

as well as the realities, of adult ageing and contribute to
any reconfiguration of ageing, its expression and the
social spaces in which it might be recognized.
A number of writers, most notably Phillipson (1982,
1998) in the UK, Estes (1979; Estes et al. 1993) and
Minkler (1996) in the USA and Kondratowitz (1998) in

Germany, have argued that the social space created for
ageing, and most particularly ageing after retirement, is
closely related to the shape and character of the welfare

state. From this perspective, social policy has two
functions. First, it enables responses to be made by
nominated agencies, in the UK local authority social
service departments. In other words, it discriminates

between key institutions, such as health, welfare and
criminal justice, and gives permission for certain forms of
action to take place. These responses will be shaped by
the culture and allocations of resources that already exist,

what these institutions see as their legitimate domain and
expertise. Second, social policy will tend to shape social
problems in the public mind. It will reinforce certain
beliefs about an issue and underplay others; it will create

an environment within which certain legitimate claims
and voices can be heard.
Social and historical trends in social policy have

assumed a massive break in personal identity and its
connection to wider society, with chronological age as the
trigger. Under the post-war welfare consensus, the status

of adult ageing was defined through pensions and the
welfare policy. Retirement, exit from the workforce, has
been used as a social as well as a financial category

through which a new social space is constructed for older
adults. The defining features of this space have, since the
inception of the welfare state, centred on dependency as a
result of physical and mental decline, plus the primacy of

child care over the needs of adult groups. Adult ageing
has thus been conceived as a burden on other productive,
or potentially productive, parts of the population.
Evidence for this view can be found in Beveridge's (1942)

original document Social Insurance and Allied Services, on
which much of the postwar consensus on health and
social care was based: 'It is dangerous', he stated, 'to be in
any way lavish to old age until adequate provision has

been assured for all other vital needs, such as the
prevention of disease and the adequate nutrition of the
young' (quoted in Wilson 1991: 39).
A number of writers have shown that increased
dependency, and the subsequent burdensomeness of
older people on production, is by no means an inevitable

consequence of ageing (Townsend 1981; Phillipson 1982;
Walker 1986). In particular, Townsend (1981, 1986) has
expanded on the view that dependency is socially

constructed. He has proposed that this structured
dependency occurs though the way that elders are
systematically excluded from the working population
through retirement policy, the poverty that results for the

majority of the aged population, the institutionalization of
a minority of older people, which then comes to stand for
the majority, and restrictions that are then placed on the
expected domestic and community roles made available

in later life. One of the consequences of structured
dependency would be that disengagement by older
people from the rest of society is seen as functional, and
that rather than investing in services to support an active

later life, 'policies of non interference would be a greater
kindness', leading to 'minimalist solutions to their
problems' (Townsend 1986: 18, 19). This is despite

evidence (Wilson 1991) that rather than being 'downhill
all the way', as policy and provision tends to assume, the
character of decline in later life is more accurately

characterized as a 'terminal drop'. This means that the
majority of older people are able to maintain physical and

intellectual functioning right up to the final months of life.
Policy assumptions of dependency and decline are

reflected in the services that have been made available to
older people. Thus, Phillipson and Walker (1986: 281)
note a 'Tendency to ghettoise work with the old, often

placing it in the hands of the lowest paid and least
trained.' Although the priorities of later life might be quite
different from those of other phases of the lifecourse,
these authors have observed that professionals tend to

'interpret and channel these demands (of older people)
into acceptable and conventional forms' (Phillipson and
Walker 1986: 282). Acceptability is age-structured, with
the priorities of youth (as the dominant client group) and

mid-adulthood (as the dominant worker group)
characterized as central and other perspectives as
marginal. Further, it is often assumed by helping

professionals that, while their training has largely
prepared them for work with children and young adults,
it is an equally valid basis on which to make judgements

about old age (Phillipson and Strang 1986). The dominant
assumption that elders constitute a burden and possibly a

threat to modern society is also reflected in the historical
nature of interventions in the lives of older people
considered to be vulnerable to abuse. Paradoxically,
intervention (for example, under section 47 of the 1948
National Assistance Act) has traditionally been restricted

to cases of self-neglect, whereby the conduct of older
people has been judged to be a danger to the health or
well-being of themselves or others.
IDENTITY AND THE EROSION OF THE WELFARE STATE
A problem with modernist policy, of both the free
market and state- controlled types, is that while
assumptions of dependency may be true for a minority of
the most vulnerable adults, and this, in social problem

terms, is a valid focus, the minority comes to stand for the
dominant experience of ageing and influences future
policy-making and public attitudes in an age-structured

manner. This is not to say that differences fail to exist
between these two forms. Phillipson and Biggs (1998)
have argued that the identities and supportive lifestyles

available to older people have moved from being
relatively controlled and uniform towards a situation

marked by increasing social diversity and a degree of
social freedom. However, a negative aspect of such
developments has been an erosion of the relative stability
afforded by such forms of social structuration.
Predictability in later life may have been exchanged for

lifestyles that are increasingly insecure and uncertain.
It is suggested that in the initial transition from pre-
modern to modern conditions, the widespread growth of
wage labour led to youth being privileged over age. The

reordering of productive relations that modernity
brought with it, however, eventually created a new social
space for old age in the form of pension and welfare
provision. This space was, from the start, embued with

ambivalence, as it represented both the success and
humanity of modernity and a burden on productivity. It
nevertheless constituted a fixed point around which the

meaning of old age could cohere and be contested. And,
insofar as persons will attempt to find social spaces that
lend some form of predictability to everyday

relationships, it made the groups in which an ageing
identity could be adopted or resisted visible. Under

postmodern conditions, however, this visibility has again
come under threat, which Phillipson and Biggs associate
with a move towards the consumption of identities and
the adoption of market economies for health and welfare.
Not only do these trends fragment the possibility of

collective identity; they obscure the very age-related
inequalities that the welfare state was intended to reduce.
According to this perspective, midlifestylism based on the

market only serves the interests of a minority of older
adults: 'For the majority of older people, however, a move

toward a consumer lifestyle seems only to promise
further marginalisation as their engagement with society
seems neither that of a producer nor of a consumer. At
the same time the role of older people as "icons" of the
welfare state, with an inalienable right to services, now

seems under attack' (Phillipson and Biggs 1998: 8).
The argument here is not necessarily to defend the

uniform and selective space that traditional welfare
arrangements provided, but to point to the relative
absence of a new legitimizing space for ageing itself. It is
unclear where a stand can be made and what it is that

acts as a spur to resistance. Estes et al. (1993) have
described the opening up of 'no care zones' in systems of
health and welfare, implying that there are some
vulnerable adults who have been excluded from any form

of support. Phillipson and Biggs (1998) extend this line of
argument to indicate the development of 'no identity
zones'. The notion of a 'no identity zone' suggests a social

space in which the construction of a genuine sense of self
is rendered impossible. The only spaces left available
effectively deny the expression of an ageing identity, and
to adopt an unacceptable identity is to render oneself
invisible and unheard. It is suggested that the
battleground has changed, from a place allotted to ageing
which can be used as a point of reference and resistance,

to one in which vulnerability must be disguised and
identity subject to Machiavellian subterfuge. With the
rolling back of welfare, the props to identity that in some

way underwrote late-life concerns have also been
significantly weakened. Accordingly, the hollowing out of
the state is paralleled by a hollowing out of the ageing

identity, a process which especially affects the old, the
sick and those without private finance.
POSTMODERNITY AND WELFARE
Phillipson and Biggs's (1998) description of

beleaguered identity and the insubstantiality of
contemporary social spaces in the world of social welfare
draws attention to the effects of wider social influences
on identity formation. As modernist hegemonies, in the

form of single defining projects around which identity
takes shape, seem to melt away, it is unclear what forces
will bind the individual to society.
Castoriades (1997: 85) indicates that the crisis of
identity in contemporary society 'Consists in the fact that
contemporary society no longer produces the types that
had made it a society wanting itself... There cannot not be

a crisis of the identification process, since there is no
longer a cathected self-representation of society as the
seat of meaning and of value, of a significant past and of a

time to come.' Western capitalist societies, it is argued,
have ceased to provide sufficiently robust links between
the person and wider society, resulting in a lack of

belonging which is not simply a matter of physical and
geographic dislocation but extends to the forces that
maintain identities intact. There is an absence of a

persuasive narrative container, necessary if individuals or
groups are to begin to find some coherence, some sense
out of a mass of parts, episodes and experiences. The
individual loses a sense of personal and societal

continuity, which is reflected at a variety of social levels.
Mongardini (1992), for example, suggests that

postmodern conditions have resulted in an inconsistency
of the 'ego image' as a consequence of a loss of coherent

social characteristics, so that it is easily absorbed into the
process of continuous social change. An accompanying
lack of historical consciousness is said to reduce a
capacity for resistance. Such trends are apparent in the

relationship between personal identifications and the
connective structures, such as organizations and services,
that bind citizens and society. Munro (1998) has

described how contemporary managerial practices
actively discourage a sense of belonging in the pursuit of
continued organizational change. Agency tradition,

loyalty and custom are no longer valued or needed under
market conditions of plentiful and 'flexible' labour supply

and globalization. The language of primary task has been
used by Obholzer (1993) to chart a similar process taking
place in health and social services. Here, the guiding
principles for action, the inspiration of hope through the
alleviation of illness and poverty, have been observed as

subject to considerable strain with the growth of market
and managerialist models of welfare. Priorities of
economy and responsibility to funders have eroded the

primacy of patient and client care, leaving the core
reasoning and legitimised motivation of workers in these

sectors confused. Nathan (1994) has indicated that the
marketization of community care for adults has resulted
in the widespread adoption of primitive psychological
coping mechanisms, such as a rigid splitting of good from
bad and a denial of negative outcomes. In this state of

affairs, collusive alliances may become typical of some
forms of adult care (Biggs 1994, 1998).
Higgs (1995) has proposed that arguing against

ageism on the basis of the right of older people to full
citizenship may have become outdated under
contemporary conditions. A combination of social

diversity, active consumerism and the encouragement to
take greater personal responsibility for personal health
and finance has eroded the value of universal welfare
provision on which the notion of citizenship rested.

Phillipson (1998) has similarly questioned the effects of
contemporary social policy on citizenship in later life.
However, here an erosion of the social connectedness

occasioned by citizenship is seen as threatening to
personal and collective identity.
Writers such as Baddeley (1995) and Bauman (1998)
suggest that these new forms of indeterminacy have
forced people to address the question of personal
responsibility. Contrary to thinking dominant in the
modern period, in its market and statist forms, Bauman

(1998) suggests that responsibility to others occurs as a
sense of obligation diminishes. Obligation, it is argued,
relies on the strength of the other to extract it, and

implies that once one's duty has been fulfilled and the
contract completed, no further or wider claims can be
made. Responsibility, on the other hand, is evoked by the

weakness of the other, suggests an empathic recognition
of the other and is, by comparison, open-ended. This view
certainly reflects Finch's (1995) observations on informal

care, which, despite attempts by right-wing policy-makers
to enforce fixed familial obligation, is increasingly coming
to reflect personal commitment and negotiated
relationships. Baddeley (1995: 1073) suggests that 'At a

time when neither individualism nor collectivism seem
able to nurture individuality, the idea of an internal polity
can enrich self awareness and strengthen a sense of

agency in the world.’
In other words, where market welfare and state
control have failed to create an adequate space for the
expression of mature identity, a premium might be placed
on an ability to internalize and reflect upon competing

definitions and strategies. This analysis would suggest the
evolution of a protected mental space, a sort of virtual test
bed for moral action, not unlike the distinction between

surface and hidden suggested by metaphors of the
masque. Further, it would appear that in the absence of
containers that are externally maintained, internal

containing spaces might have to be created.
IMPLICATIONS: A NEW INDETERMINACY
If health and social care constitute an alternative
space for ageing to that posed by the development of

midlifestyles, it is clear that it is hardly more likely to
contain environments in which a genuine sense of ageing
identity can take shape. Each, although in
characteristically different ways, restricts the aspects of

personal identity that can be expressed. The likelihood of
genuine identity statements occurring, in the sense of a
joining of internal and external logics of ageing, seems
remote. Rather, a mature identity would appear to be
reflected through the distorting mirrors of excessive
dependency or excessive autonomy. For many of the
vulnerable old this would seem to hold the promise of

being either controlled or ignored. Developments in social
policy seem to indicate increased indeterminacy rather
than increased security. The likelihood correspondingly

increases that the containing spaces created by services
will prove insufficiently robust either to form the basis of
identity formation or as positions against which

significant forms of resistance can take shape. A
trajectory of personal and social congruence in which

masquerade is minimized and genuine expression
increased, requires that reflective social spaces open up
in which the relationship between past, present and
future can be examined and serve as a basis for agency. It
is, however, unclear whether contemporary policy spaces

can increase the possibilities for this form of coherence.
8
Policy spaces in health and welfare
POSSIBILITIES FOR REFLECTIVE AWARENESS
The description of social spaces contained in Chapter
7 has drawn attention to two of their qualities. First,
social spaces can be seen as seemingly naturally

occurring, yet socially constructed, arenas in which
people can more easily perform some identities than

others. Identity performance is a more or less
unselfconscious activity under such conditions, and is
closely related to common-sense reality as described in

the work of Schutz (1962) and Berger and Luckman
(1971). Identities which jar with the dominant
expectations contained within any one social space would
be difficult to perform in such a setting and subject to
sanction. A persistent attempt to perform an identity that

conflicted with the assumptions implicit in such a space
could be described as an act of resistance (Foucault
1979). If no space can be found in which even resistive
expression can take place, then one has entered a 'no
identity zone' (Phillipson and Biggs 1998). Second,
certain social spaces emerge as self-consciously reflective
containers. That is to say, qualities of the containing space
make it easier for people to stand back from the

performance of everyday identities and make connections
between them. They also invite the creation of new
prefigurative spaces in which entirely different identities

might take shape. An element particularly related to the
emergence of mature imagination would be the likelihood

of connecting here and now experience to the past and to
possible futures and then working towards the self-
conscious shaping of a social environment in which these
relationships could be expressed.
People in this second type of space would be acting
and thinking reflexively insofar as they became able to

perform while taking into account the multiple social
influences upon them. This could be thought of as an
outer, horizontal form of awareness, as it increases

understanding of contemporary social influences and
possibilities. However, reflexivity lacks an inner, vertical
dimension that is brought into being through a
consideration of the psyche as layered and that different

layers include possibly contradictory hopes and fears
which influence consciousness. Awareness of this vertical
layering and its effects on social behaviour is what is

meant by being able to act and think reflectively.
An example of the first type of social space might be
when professional workers and older adults

automatically perform dependent and independent roles
in conformity with unstated but commonly accepted
health and welfare stereotypes. In the second type, the

social environment would allow participants to
understand and modify their behaviour at a number of
levels, perhaps acknowledging that interaction contains
elements of masquerade which might obscure more deep-

seated concerns and desires, perhaps allowing
participants to weave elements of their past and potential
selves into a performance, perhaps confronting the
networks of power that have previously fixed

relationships and spaces. In each case there would be an
invitation to progress beyond immediate surface
elements.
Typically, social spaces emerge on a continuum

between the first and second sorts, and in practical terms
it is more helpful to understand the likelihood that any

one space will facilitate reflexive and reflective
awareness. Sometimes such spaces are 'artificially'
created, as in the case of an overtly therapeutic group or a
listening post, as described in Chapter 7. Sometimes a

facilitative and containing space emerges alongside
preexistent material and social-psychological phenomena.
Examples here might include existing institutions,

organizational cultures and social policies which make it
more rather than less likely that activity based on this
form of understanding will occur. Spaces could be thought
of as facilitative when the need for masquerade is

reduced, and a merging of inner and outer logics informs
personal agency. Primacy is assumed for an inner logic,
which is nevertheless in time with, or tuned into, external
and intersubjective realities. The apprehension of social

realities is thus rendered reflectively real. A social space
is therefore a social and psychological reality which may
or may not correspond with a particular physical
environment. It is held in place by a number of factors,

including the interests of powerful stakeholders, policies
and regulations, political and professional ideologies. It
contributes to the likelihood of a certain masquerade

being performed and the possibility that deeper layers of
psychological meaning can be expressed. Spaces that
emerge in the field of social policy are particularly

important to the mature imagination because they have
come to define, in the popular mind, the shape and

circumference of ageing.
POLICY AND SOCIAL SPACE
In questions of health and welfare a factor of defining

importance for the shape and possibilities inherent in a
social space is the environment created by social policy.
Each of the three movements in Western social policy

since the Second World War can be seen as an invitation
to think differently about freedom of expression, and thus
the ways in which people must perform to benefit. There
follows a potted history of state, market and the 'new'
social democratic welfarism, which highlights some of
these key factors.
Under the classic welfare state (Lowe 1994) which

formed the basis for post-war welfare consensus on
health and social care, participation was by mandate, and

freedom and security were increased through the
removal of debilitating barriers to self-improvement.
Thus, it was assumed that if Beveridge's (1942) five
giants of want, ignorance, squalor, disease and idleness

could be slain, or at least diminished in size, equality of
opportunity would be increased. This model relied on
state intervention legitimized by the popular vote, plus

the inclusion of considerable deference to expert opinion.
State intervention increased uniform support, but fuelled
a myth of an emerging dependency culture (Dean and
Taylor-Gooby 1992) which eventually became its

undoing. Removal of barriers to self-development was
perceived to increase the adoption of a dependent
performance on the part of some of those who used its
services.
Market models have promised participation through
the hidden hand of accumulated choices. These are seen
to be made by individual consumers and the injection of
competitive and managerial values into services (Le

Grand and Bartlett 1993). Self-expression comes to be
dominated, under such an approach, by a relative ability
to pick and choose provision on the basis of the best

available information. The legitimacy of different
participants in health and social care is conceived in
terms of purchasing power, efficient provision and

consumer desire, plus the elimination of vested interests.
This market vision also requires that a rigid distinction be
made between the public sphere of the market and

private and collective loyalties. This is deemed necessary
to ensure unbiased competition (Bauman 1995), but also
gives rise to coercive approaches to caring obligations.
These forces eventually fragment welfare environments

and result in increased uncertainty and an unravelling of
established relations, resulting in unsustainable levels of
social exclusion.
Social democratic conceptions of health and social

care have valued participative decision-taking by
stakeholders (Blair 1996). Stakeholders are seen to
include a large number of groups and interests who will
affect or be affected by emergent social policy, and

spreads consultation on it beyond immediate users,
providers and purchasers, to include specific pressure
and interest groups and less specifically defined social

and geographic communities. A key motivation behind
social policy of this type is to decrease social exclusion
(Jordan 1996) so as to re-establish a commonly held

social project with which all members of society can
identify (MacPherson 1997). Social inclusion is seen to

depend upon citizens accepting certain responsibilities as
well as rights, and in this respect draws heavily on ideas
of communitarianism (Etzioni 1997). Valid performances
tend to depend on an ability or willingness to take part in
various mechanisms for partnership, introducing

concerns about the degree to which potential participants
have the capacity to be included.
Under each of these movements in social policy, the
space available for legitimate social performance has

changed shape, and invites different possibilities for
mature identity. They also configure the value of health
and welfare services in different ways and raise diverse
questions about the explanatory value of primary task.
CHALLENGES TO PRIMARY TASK
The concept of primary task, which is heavily reliant
upon the notion of a single and determining goal for social

activity in organizations, is challenged by each of the
policy spaces outlined above. It is perhaps best suited to a
unitary model, as exemplified by statist intervention in

health and welfare. A single core policy, while always
something of a fiction, is most easily identified under
conditions where provision is uniform and universal. It is
easier to articulate a formal 'work task' against which

alternative conceptions of function and activity can be
judged. The implications of such shaping can be felt
throughout a social system as provision takes on the
standard and 'total' character exemplified by Goffman's

(1961) study of asylums and Townsend's (1963) work on
the institutionalization of older people. Mechanisms, both
formal and informal, arise to maintain behavioural
conformity and categorize dissent as deviation. Difficulty
is experienced in acknowledging the legitimacy of claims
to difference along, among others, lines of ethnicity (Patel
1990), gender (Bernard and Meade 1993) and disability

(Morris 1991). Here, the primary task model can be used
to understand distinctions between what a system has
been set up to do, and the uses and contested spaces that
emerge as it develops. The point is less that weaknesses
of an account based on primary task lie in the privileging
of one definition of activity over another (although it

tends to do this as well), than that it assumes an
underlying state of stability within the whole system. It is

possible to talk in terms of primary task because it can be
assumed that the task is relatively fixed. It can thus act as
a stable point of reference in relation to which people can
take a stand of agreement or resistance. If, however, the
system is itself in a state of flux, notions of primary task

tend to break down.
Challenges to the primacy of one guiding task exist in
both the market and social democratic models of health
and welfare policy. Market conceptions of welfare have

been part of a wider attempt to engineer a shift in social
behaviour away from organized collectivism, and it might
be argued collective altruism, towards a system driven by
competition and individualism. They also place economic

priorities of efficiency and accountability to funders over
professional ethics and notions of care for its own sake
(Caputo 1988). If welfare is seen, for example, as creating

dependency and a drain on the national economy, a core
goal of policy becomes the reduction of these costs, which
have then to become part and parcel of each interaction

between professional helpers and people who require
services. One of the issues in this area is whether it is

possible to graft principles and solutions essentially
generated for other social priorities on to welfare
systems, without raising a series of new problems. Here,
the imposition of market economic solutions to problems
that consist largely of human distress and vulnerability

leads to conflicting notions of primary task. On the one
hand the task would be to alleviate need and on the other
to reduce costs to other parts of society, thus reducing the

services available for the first task. So incompatible work
priorities come to inhabit the same policy space. The

problem in terms of primary task is that the ideology in
question is intended to achieve quite different results
from those suggested by the original institutional task,
and a struggle for dominance results.
The social-democratic emphasis on stakeholding also

destabilizes the notion of a single primary task. Here,
multiple and competing definitions and priorities need to

be taken explicitly into account within the policy arena.
Thus it is difficult to arrive at one morally ascendant
definition of task. There are, of course, contradictions and
tensions within the social-democratic project, in that the

antidote to social exclusion is seen in finding a task that
can, in its ideal form, include all interests. Pragmatically,
however, the process of achieving a maximum number of
adherents requires attention to the negotiated and

contingent qualities of decisionmaking. The notion of
primacy has therefore to change from an explicit and
single work task to a higher-level objective of creating a

space within which negotiated solutions can be found. In
other words, it has moved from an explicit policy concern
with content to one that attempts to create and sustain
the conditions under which participation can take place.
The move towards recognizing a multiplicity of agendas,
and the idea that policy might best be conceived as a force
that facilitates process rather than content, challenges the

notion of primacy.
Lawrence's (1977) attempt to configure multiple

primary tasks does not help here: first, because he mostly
describes misunderstandings or accommodations to a
task which is ill-defined; and second, because to suggest
multiple primary tasks contradicts the essence of primacy

itself. Semantically speaking, there can either be a
primary task which dominates or multiple tasks, but not
both.
This debate on primacy versus multiplicity highlights
the family resemblances between changes in policy and
the proposition that we are living in postmodern times.

This is particularly the case when professional and
service user identities are discussed. Both market and

social-democratic approaches to welfare reflect trends
that have previously been identified with a move from

conditions of modernity to postmodernity, and it is to that
debate that we now return.
IDENTITIES, PARTNERSHIP AND POSTMODERNITY
That adult service systems exist under conditions of
continued flux and uncertainty has been noted on both

sides of the Atlantic (Estes et al., 1993; Howe 1994;
Leonard 1997). A discussion of policy as shaping social

space highlights the point that change is not simply
structural in its effects, but also influences how identities
are managed between service users and helping
professionals and between different professional groups.

Debates on user participation and interprofessionalism
are two areas in which traditional positions have become
contested and the opportunities for new relationships are

most apparent. In this context identity becomes an
important crossroads between the experience of self, day-

to-day communication and expectations arising from
social policy. In this sense, the study of identities that

different professions, players, stakeholders and interests
adopt serves as a bridge to understanding the

relationship between the personal and broader social and
political forces. The permeability of these identities—in
other words, how far the barriers between various groups
can be reduced—and whether this is perceived as
desirable would influence how participants behave
towards each other and their responsiveness to policy
change.
Partnership, in both its interprofessional and
participative aspects, presents a considerable challenge to

the performance of adult identity under conditions of
modernity. Modernity refers, in this context, to a society
in which boundaries are relatively impermeable and
identities are more or less fixed, as are expectations on

the conduct of relationships between groups and
individuals. There can be little doubt that much of the
traditional identity of professional groupings rests on

what can now be identified as 'modern' foundations.
Medicine and nursing, for example, have drawn heavily
on technical/scientific knowledge to justify their expert
status, while social work has been closely identified with

notions of universality and equity. Both health and
welfare professions have been seen as part and parcel of a
great movement for progress characteristic of much of
the twentieth century. Under modern conditions,

professional boundaries and a clear distinction between
helper and helped would be key to keeping service
systems stable and predictable.
Postmodernity leads to a questioning of these

foundations by pointing to the arbitrariness of
professional divisions, the unforeseen risks associated

with scientific progress and the possibility of choosing
identities that may not be governed by ascribed roles and
hierarchies. It marks a shift towards a much more fluid
state of affairs, in which certain identities might be

chosen in order to enter particular relationships with
others, but then discarded as other situations and
opportunities become available. Similarly, boundaries

between groups become more permeable, allowing
greater awareness of interconnectedness and movement
between institutional systems (a greater awareness, for
example, that chief executives can also be patients and

that service users with disabilities have active lives and
identities independent of medical conditions).
This postmodern perspective suggests that identity is

no longer a stable phenomenon and that the hierarchies
that aim to fix relationships, such as that between 'senior'
professions and professions related to them, and that
between those who control the allocation of services and
those who need and receive them, are breaking down.

Many of the trends associated with health and welfare
reform would resonate with this analysis, at least at the
level of policy on the relationship between professions.

Developments such as the blurring of distinctions
between medicine and advanced nursing practice and the
movement of staff from a variety of professional

backgrounds into management positions could be
interpreted as evidence of postmodern change. Indeed,
increased emphasis given to monitoring and

coordination, multiprofessionalism and user participation
would also suggest new spaces in which users and
professionals work together, created by the breakdown of
established boundaries. In other words, contemporary

service trends are prefigurative in that they make some
relationships more likely to emerge than others. Under
postmodern conditions, one would expect positions to

become flexible and interchangeable. The identities of
people who make up the system would change,

chameleon-like, depending on the situation in which they
found themselves. Service users become persons in need
in one context, experts in the consumption of services in
another and decision-makers in yet another. Professional
workers similarly become specialists, advocates,

purchasers, providers and consumers of services
depending on their circumstances.
UTOPIAN POSSIBILITIES
Crook et al. (1992) have outlined a process
characteristic of moves from modernity and into
postmodernity, which immediately suggests parallels

with trends towards interprofessionalism and user
participation. They indicate that organizational and

professional cultures and identities mutate from a
situation of differentiation through hyperdifferentiation

and towards dedifferentiation. Differentiation refers to a
separating out of particular groups. These might include
the professions of medicine, nursing, psychology, social
work and so on. Differentiation also describes a clearer
distinction, emergent between professionals and users.

Differentiation allows the development of particular
groupings of expertise and closer communication within
groups with the same specialist knowledge. Professional
identities come to be based on the increasing
specification of identifiably distinct and differentiated

patient or client groups. However, as these processes
gather pace, distinctions become hyperdifferentiated.
Specialisms become so marked and so circumscribed that

it is difficult, even for members of the same professional
group, to communicate meaningfully. A consequence of
this hyperdifferentiated specialization is that it is as easy

to communicate with someone in a completely different
field, or in markedly different circumstances, as it is to

restrict communication to an exclusively
intraprofessional discourse. Communication then
becomes 'dedifferentiated'. This would mean that
professionals begin to share ideas across 'modern'
professional boundaries, and it becomes easier for users

and workers to share in decision-making.
This process of diversification and recombination
would suggest new opportunities for users and
professionals to work together in the space created by the

breakdown of old divisions, an increased permeability of
boundaries and openness to alternative perspectives.
Moves towards user participation and
interprofessionalism might both reflect and contribute to

this momentum, away from old certainties and towards a
situation that is more ambiguous and in many cases more
ambivalent as well. User participation suggests an

increasing permeability for boundaries between
professionals and non-professionals, while
interprofessionalism presents a similar challenge to

distinctions within the professional arena.
Interprofessionalism and participation
A striking feature of research on interprofessionalism
and participation is that it is fragmentary and small in

scale. Beckingham (1997), in her review of US and
Canadian literature, has called this the 'Here's what we do
at our university or in this service setting' approach to
collaboration. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, this coexists with

an absence, relative to other fields of applied research, of
conceptual models and theoretical frameworks. The
frameworks that are being used fall into two categories.
First, there are approaches arising directly from a
particular position in the service system. These would
include an 'empowerment' perspective, as promoted by
users themselves (Croft and Beresford 1992; Morris

1992; Town et al. 1997) and their allies (Ward and
Mullander 1991; Stevens 1993), which generally
describes barriers to active participation. By contrast,

writers from a broadly 'managerialist' perspective
(Øvretveit 1993; Nocon 1994; Mitchell and Coats 1997)
have focused on how service systems work and can be

developed. A second group of approaches has arisen from
particular theoretical positions. Most notable here are

workers using a psychodynamic framework (Woodhouse
and Pengelly 1991; Stokes 1994), a systems approach
(Rawson 1994) and a functionalist approach (Øvretveit et
al. 1997), although in this last example the model is often
assumed rather than explicit.
There appears, however, to be relatively little

dialogue across these positional and theoretical
boundaries, nor between different positions and interests.
Biggs (1993b: 153) has, for example, noted in a review of

partnership issues that: 'Whilst there are debates on both
interprofessional collaboration and user participation,
there is almost no literature on the relationship between
the two.' The reader is left with an impression that

writers in this field exist on the boundaries of a number of
intersecting interests. Practitioners write up their
collaborative projects. Activists set out their stalls.

Theorists periodically turn their attention to its
continuing development. As a whole, the discussion of
interprofessionalism and user voice reproduces

characteristics of its field of study insofar as it is partial
and frequently consists of atomized instances and

explanations. In this context, Katz (1996) has noted that
while gerontology has from its inception involved a
variety of disciplines, it consists of groups that live side-
by-side rather than in meaningful dialogue. There is very
little genuine sharing of perspectives or attempt at

merger. Partnership is, in this sense, everyone's relative
but no one's child.
Despite these discontinuities in the literature, it is
possible to draw out key areas of agreement. To begin

with, both participation and interdisciplinarity are
viewed as positive developments that in some way
improve service delivery. Second, a paradigm shift
towards shared definitions of service situations is

required if positive change is to take place. Third,
effective partnership requires a negotiated balance
between the special contributions of each partner. Finally,

identification with an overarching goal that is greater
than any individual contribution acts to bind participants
together. However, it is unclear how far these common

factors may simply mark out the value judgements of the
field itself. They often have the feel of being reactions to

problems of coordination that are tacit, rather than
explicitly drawn.
A focus on older people as specified partners in
interprofessional care is limited. Much of the literature
takes a generic position towards user groups, to which

can be added significant contributions from the fields of
mental health and disability. Work that refers specifically
to older people includes: Biggs (1993b), who used
examples from primary and community care services for

older people and their carers; Sparkes's (1994) study of
professional attitudes towards older people within an
interprofessional context; Evers et al.'s (1994) review of
interprofessional work with old and disabled people;

Myers and MacDonald's (1996) description of social
worker evaluations of user involvement, which draws on
work with older people; Beckingham's (1997) paper on

interdisciplinary health care teamwork in the care of the
elderly; and Camara's (1997) description of
interdisciplinary elderly care in Brazil. Common themes

include: the older person (in this case, as a nominated
user or as an informal carer) as expert in the

consumption of care, its coordination and quality; the
tendency for attitudes to older people and their needs to
be influenced by professional background and forms of
organization; and the tendency for gerontology to be
naturally interdisciplinary by virtue of the complexity and

multifaceted experience of health and ageing.
Beckingham (1997: 19) observes that
interdisciplinary collaboration is often interpreted 'to
mean that boundaries of disciplines will become

increasingly blurred and members will exchange roles
and responsibilities according to the needs of the
situation.' Certainly, literature on participation seems to
assume the adoption of multiple roles and identities, such

that users may become recipients of care at one moment,
co-workers the next and quality assessors in yet another.
Such observations are tempered by Rawson (1994), who

considers that the establishment of internal markets in
health care has made professions increasingly rivalrous
and prone to defensiveness. Rather than blurring

boundaries, the extra stress associated with competition
makes professionals retreat to more rigid identities. The

complexity of participative and interprofessional
frameworks may be owing in part to policy trends which
are apparently pulling in different directions (Biggs
1997a, b). First, unifying tendencies towards general
management and quality control tend to merge

operational identities. Second, diversifying tendencies
towards user participation and the appreciation of
individual need tend to foster a fragmentation of

preexisting systems. If identities are to respond flexibly to
these new conditions, participants might need to

experience autonomy within a containing and supportive
structure, which would have a strong preformative
element (Latimer 1997). This structure would be able to
sustain a crucial balance between the blurring of roles
and the recognition of specialist expertise. Trends

towards the establishment of multiple identities help to
keep such systems afloat in that, identity wise,
participants can keep their options open. Similarly, a

migration to the boundaries of systems and a
concentration on boundary management protects identity
through distance. Examples of boundary management

include inspection and quality control as well as
interprofessional collaboration. In each case the focus of
activity has moved away from what is going on within any

one context, and towards negotiations across or between
contexts and sectors.
Expert consumption and para-professionalism
Where partnership has led to a blurring of traditional
role relationships, it may also lead to the opening up of
new spaces in which to exercise the mature imagination.

Key to understanding this possibility is the degree to
which, during the performance of identity in these spaces,
expression is promoted or hidden.
One notion that repeatedly arises in this literature is
that of the adult service user as expert in some way. Thus,

Evers et al. (1994) have proposed that older people and
their carers are expert in a variety of ways: on

themselves, on their requirements and in negotiating the
vagaries of service provision. Recognition of users as
expert consumers (Biggs 1993b) would provide an active
legitimizing role which might form the basis of a more

equal communication with professionals. Rawson (1994)
similarly identifies the 'client as an active partner' in
some aspects of the interprofessional process. This, he

says, is most apparent as 'articulation work', whereby the
efforts of team members must be given a coherent form,
rather than becoming a collection of unrelated inputs. The
user or carer becomes the one person who maintains a

sense of continuity, experiences the gaps and thus holds
valuable information on the quality of service.
It has been argued by Miles (1994) that while

progress has been slow, new arrangements for
community care have opened an opportunity for
participation in decision-making that had not previously
been available. The development of 'elderly forums' and
formal mechanisms for support and consultation has

provided a space within which being someone who uses
services carries a positive and active connotation. Miles
has been active in facilitating the position of carers of

older people as advisors in the reorganization of service
systems across existing service boundaries. Similar work
in psychiatric settings (Steinberg 1992) indicates that

interprofessional working may be especially fertile
ground for the involvement of users as properly informed
participants. This, he suggests, is due to the need for a

style in which professionals learn to help to manage
aspects of each other's work without taking it over.
The quest for expert partnership has extended to
residential settings. Means and Smith (1994) have noted

that while market models of care have tended to
emphasize empowerment through the right of 'exit', they
have also led to a growth in regulation and quality control
in which people can directly participate. For example, van

Geen (1997) reports on a 'measure and discuss' method
which promotes empowerment though the regular use of
focus groups. Here an external body collaborates with
residents in presenting their analysis of care quality and

in monitoring improvements. Opportunities for using
older people as 'lay inspectors' or 'undercover grannies',
in other words as consultants to registration and

inspection teams, have recently been revived by Boateng
(1997).
This focus on expertness has been closely related to

the view that the users of services can take on some of the
skills used by trained workers. They can, in other words,
become para-professionals. Thus, Bond (1992) has

argued that one of the consequences of the introduction
of care management and coordination roles has been a
growing respect of carers as the working partners of
professional helpers. Twigg and Aitkin (1993) also

identified co-working as one of four forms of carer-
professional relationship, which may now be privileged
by policy trends. Para-professionalism refers to co-opting
the carer into a similar role to the professional worker in

some areas, and includes the transfer of skills and specific
training being developed for the carer. It is contended
that this would enhance and legitimize carer status and
might eventually lead to a situation described by

Øvretveit (1997) as 'co-servicing'. However, such trends
have also been greeted with caution. Biggs (1993a) has
argued that alliances based on tasks shared between care

managers and informal carers can lead to collusion that
can exclude the person being cared for. In addition, it may
become increasingly difficult for the co-opted person to

express his or her separate needs and identity. Forbes
and Sashidharan (1997) point out that while the inclusion

of users in the organization and delivery of services has
been welcomed by planners, academics and practitioners,
it brings the danger that users will be incorporated into
existing systems and lose their ability to challenge them.
If, as has been suggested above, trends towards

interprofessionalism and participation have contributed
to the opening up of new spaces in which to perform
welfare identities, partners as expert and as para-
professional would appear to be strong candidates. They

tie in well both with the market ideology of autonomy and
choice and with the 'new' social democratic demand for
stakeholding and negotiation through participation.
However, both also rely on the user of services becoming

ever closer, in terms of identity, to those who work in a
particular service. Expertness ensures a place at a table
that pre-exists, and has a shape that has already been

agreed. One performs as an expert among all the other
experts. While it allows the possibility of reflexive
engagement with service processes, this should not be

mistaken for the expression of a reflective engagement
with deeper psychological processes. How far one is able

to be oneself in partnership, rather than simply servicing
the agendas of others, is rarely explicitly addressed.
Similarly, para-professionalization says little about the
inner logic of the adult psyche. Instead, it ensures
conformity to a different intersubjective world, that of

professionality. In both cases the invitation, extended
under the banner of partnership, is to become 'one of us',
to enter the space of professional concerns. It is certainly

an active role, but, as we have seen, activity is not
necessary the ally of critical reflective space.
The utopian scenarios sketched out in these spaces
exhibit a tendency to assume that participants are well,
solvent and articulate. The consumer of health and
welfare has thus to masquerade as simultaneously

independent and autonomous as well as in distress. By
the drawing of users into human service systems, it is
argued, they can achieve a recognition and status that

would not otherwise be available to them. However, this
process would also tend to disguise imbalances in power
between parties in its attempt to define a common project

in which all stakeholders can be usefully employed. What
is unclear is where the existential concerns of age might
fit in such a scenario, if it is based upon improving

services in their existing forms. If there are no substantive
means of addressing hidden or vertical levels of meaning,
then partnership simply approximates a wider, rather
than deeper, exercise in quality control. It is also unclear

how people whose conditions inhibit participation find a
place within this scheme of things. The question of where
to locate people whose circumstances, conduct or desires
may not fit into this utopian space is discussed below.
DYSTOPIAN POSSIBILITIES
The view described above is at once familiar and
puzzlingly awry as a description of contemporary health

and welfare. If this is a utopian vision of the postmodern
welfare state, there are also discordant and distinctly

dystopian possibilities lurking beneath its celebration of
surface relationships. Problems arise as a result of what
initially appear to be the 'free floating' identities that
postmodern thinkers have suggested, but on closer

inspection exist in a closely circumscribed social space. A
central feature of the response to fragmentation and
changeability, that it is no longer certain where

boundaries should be drawn and how stable and reliable
those boundaries are, is to attempt a premature closure

and again to fix identity and make it predictable. Under
such conditions, felt uncertainty would affect both

professional and user positions, provoking a defensive
retrenchment and the erection of rigid boundaries. Using

the example of social work, Howe (1994: 513) describes
this growing uncertainty in the following way: 'A child of
modernity, social work now finds itself in a postmodern
world, uncertain whether or not there are any deep and
unwavering principles which define the essence of its
character and hold it together as a coherent enterprise.'
Further, the nature of citizenship, a concept closely linked

to that of participation and to hearing the user's voice, has
also been subjected to a destabilizing attack. Citizenship
'has moved from being an embodiment of universal social

rights to a much more narrow conception ... This shift is in
part the product of changes in social structure which have
led individuals to stress their difference from one another

rather than their (common) identity' (Higgs 1995: 536).
So what is happening to those boundaries that
describe legitimacy? While there is movement towards

fluidity, is there not also a sequestration of experience
that Giddens (1991) has warned us about, and that in
psychodynamic terms would be thought of as a splitting
off of incompatible conflicts of identity? (Nathan 1994)

Two developments in contemporary social policy give
some indication of the dystopian spaces that are taking
shape around those who will not or cannot become active
participants in partnership. First, there has been a

growing concern with adults as the subjects of abuse and
an accompanying preoccupation with surveillance. The
growth of concern about adult protection in the USA
(Baumhover and Beall 1996) and the UK and Australasia

(Kingston and Penhale 1995) marks an interesting case
study in the development of new social spaces in which
overt and tacit agendas can be identified. Second, there

has been a perceived need to define the conditions under
which users fail in their mental capacity. In other words, a
debate has emerged over how to legitimize absence from

other legitimizing spaces.
Figure 8.1 Contemporary policy spaces.
THE OBJECTS OF SURVEILLANCE
One consequence of the 'hollowing out' of the state
(Rhodes 1995) that accompanied marketization has been
the distancing of workers and service users from each
other. This includes a migration away from contact with

the complex and emotionally disturbing material
associated with direct care and towards the regulation of

spaces in which informal or privatized care takes place. A
number of concrete policy initiatives can, in retrospect, be
seen as contributing to a change of practice in this
direction. These include the inspection of services

delivered outwith the state (Brammer 1994), the
development of community supervision (Atkinson 1996)
and an increased interest in adult abuse and protection

(Biggs et al. 1995). Each of these developments has
decreased the role of direct care and increased the role of

some form of monitoring conduct. In other words, as part
of the dystopian underbelly of contemporary welfare, the
new space emerging for non-participative adults is as the

objects of surveillance.
This space is Foucauldian in character, such that

coercive mechanisms permeate social systems beyond
actual, physical, institutions. Techniques of control, it
appears, are being 'broken down into flexible methods of
control, which may be transferred and adapted ... [as]
centres of observation disseminated throughout society'
(Foucault 1977: 211-12).
Followers of Foucault, such as Porter (1997), have

linked surveillance to the promotion of holistic care.
Holism is part and parcel of increased surveillance into

the minutiae of daily life. It is argued that, on the one
hand, practitioners are encouraged to see users as
rounded individuals, while, on the other, holism brings
increasingly more of an individual's behaviour and

personality under professional control. Brammer and
Biggs (1998) have argued that a similar process of ever
broader and more inclusive definitions of abusive
behaviour serves a similar function in the case of elder

protection. In Foucault's work, a process is described
whereby conventional values are in flux, and professional
discourses emerge to interpenetrate the evolution of new

commonsensual understandings of normality. As a newly
defined social problem takes shape, disciplines emerge
and 'swarm' around it, making sense of it and defining its
parameters (Foucault 1977). Further, Foucault (1979: 86)
indicated that 'power is tolerable only on condition that it
mask a substantial part of itself. Its success is
proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms.'
Observations such as these have provoked Penna and

O'Brien (1996) to note that modern health and welfare
institutions often operate according to logics that are at
extreme variance from their normative humanitarian

concerns.
It emerges, from this analysis, that the creation of a
new social space is very much a dynamic process which

coheres over time and at some point comes together.
Elements that had previously developed independently
might begin to 'make sense' in new ways as spaces
becomes established. However, the underlying processes

of control that lend shape to any one space may not be the
same as its products, nor an overt rationale that would
usually be employed to justify it. The processes and

effects of such systems may be hidden from both those
who operate within them and those upon whom they are
employed.
Elder abuse had been identified as a social problem in
both the USA (O'Malley et al. 1979) and the UK (Eastman
1984), but until the 1990s had only provoked a policy and
practice response only in the USA (Pillemer and Wolf
1986). This suggests that the 'discovery' of abuse may be
the product of particular social and historical conditions.

These conditions would lend a coherence and meaning to
abuse that would not otherwise be available to it. Such
coherence goes beyond the commendable humanitarian

reasoning that demands that adults be able to live their
lives free from intimidation and exploitation. It indicates
that an understanding of abuse has been shaped by

particular political, professional and policy concerns. In
the UK, formal recognition of this 'new' social problem
occurred contemporaneously with a policy initiative, the
implementation of the 1990 NHS and Community Care

Act, which included moves, through the adoption of care
management, to engineer a privatized welfare economy
with an emphasis on obligatory care by relatives. Care
management was introduced as a specialist method of
coordinating privatized support to an informal carer at
minimum cost. A common aim of such policies in English-
speaking countries has been to transfer financial and
caring responsibility for dependent adults away from the
collective and on to individual families. While USA
literature available at the time of adoption in the UK and

Australia had identified a variety of case management
models (see Kanter 1988; Austin and O'Connor 1989;
Moxley 1989), it is equally clear that policy-makers

identified a version of case management which
emphasized its role in facilitating the development of a

welfare market, rather than direct intervention.
This model, in terms of rationale and orientation, did
not fit well with other trends in welfare practice. In other
words, while this technology solved a policy problem of

how to engineer a privatized welfare economy, it made
little sense for front-line workers, until that time engaged

in direct service provision. Further, its signature was one
of indirectness, assessment and monitoring. It existed as a

solution at the fiscal level which required a problem at
the level of face-work to lend it coherence.
The problem of adult abuse had reached professional
salience at a time when the relationship between formal
and informal care was being restructured. The role of
professional workers and the nature of informal care
were both contested and in a state of considerable flux.

The absence of a formal mechanism for enforcing
informal care-giving, which is at root a voluntary activity,
was problematic for such a policy and has arguably found

resolution through an emphasis on forms of abuse
perpetrated by carers on service users (Biggs 1996).
Further, the changes provoked a crisis of primary task,

noted earlier, for professional carers, who found their
direct care roles being replaced by the assessment and
monitoring entailed by care management. This sudden

concern for the safety and financial security of vulnerable
adults legitimized a powerful role for welfare
professionals within the otherwise bleak landscape

created by community care policy.
It is not, then, that community care has made us more

aware of forms of adult abuse, but that abuse gives
meaning to care in the community, which had lost its
primary task. Before the 'discovery' of abuse,
technologies such as case management were, at least at

the level of practice, the welfare equivalent of a solution
looking for a problem. Case management had been
introduced to reduce welfare expenditure and was out of
sympathy with the existing task of direct care. Monitoring
for adult abuse filled a vacuum at the heart of community

care policy, giving it a coherence it previously lacked.
Abuse provides the excuse for this invasion of the private
sphere, a shift from consent to coercion and from support

to surveillance. Contemporary awareness of adult abuse
may radically change the space in which adult services
exist, and combines with agreement in the UK (Decalmer

and Glendenning 1993) and the USA (Baumhover and
Beall 1996) that interprofessionality will become
increasingly important as services respond to abuse. In

this, adult protective services can be expected to follow
trends in child protection towards interprofessional
collaboration and investigatory technique (Hallett and
Birchall 1992). The persuasiveness of the 'abuse'

phenomenon lies in its ability to tap into a number of
discourses in the care of older people, combining
reference to longstanding critiques of institutional care,
ageism and a search for higher-status professional
identities and collaborations.
There is another snake in the postmodern utopia, and
it concerns the question of what to do with people who
cannot or will not participate. This trend is reflected in
activities of the UK Law Commission and in the Lord

Chancellor's (1997) consultation paper on mental
incapacity entitled Who Decides? The initiative constitutes
an attempt to achieve a legally binding test of capacity,

when it would be in the best interests of the individual
adult in receipt of care to have decisions taken for him or
her and the conditions and qualities of persons given the

general authority to act reasonably under such
circumstances. The debate has expanded to include the
public law protection of people at risk, which includes the

awarding of powers to professionals to investigate
suspected cases of abuse. These developments therefore
consider when an adult can be judged unable to make his
or her own decisions, a consideration which has been

linked to the granting of adult protective powers.
Viewed in the light of policy movement in the
direction of partnership, the debate on mental capacity
can be seen as a search for a place for nonparticipants. It
solves the problem of how to locate people who have
become the shadow side of the great stakeholding project,
and objectifies the conditions under which adults can

legitimately be excused from entering that space. A
problem here lies in the possibility that being mentally
incapacitated is not the only criterion for social inclusion,

exclusion or exploitation. First, Podnieks (1992), for
example, has argued that abused older people are in fact
tough, stoical survivors, while other writers (in Biggs et

al. 1995) have drawn attention to the myth, commonly
held among caring professionals, that abused adults are

dependent on their abusers, whereas evidence points to
the abuser often being dependent, emotionally or
materially, on the victim. Second, Davis (1996) has
pointed out that empowerment philosophy, which would
include moves towards partnership, is more a system of

values than a model of mental health and illness, and
cannot in itself act as a framework for understanding and
working with disturbed people. An exclusive positioning
of relationships in terms of partnership might thereby

eclipse the space set aside for less tractable problems,
such as illness, poverty and mental disability. These
observations are reminiscent of Miller and Gwynne's
(1972) finding that professionals might set unrealistic

goals for people who are in reality vulnerable and frail,
and Gubrium and Wallace's (1990) parody of the

uncritical application of activity theory regardless of the
health status of older residents.
There is a danger, in other words, that new spaces

have been created on the assumption that there is
actually very little wrong with people in receipt of care
and that they can therefore be treated Tike anyone else'.

If the climate of care fosters such expectations, which
would tend to ignore real disabilities, users are being set
up to fail, for rather than only the disability being seen, as
had occurred under modernist welfare (Oliver 1990), the

disability has now been occluded and is hardly seen at all.
Just as a postmodern reliance on consumer identity has

been used to eclipse the limits set by an ageing body and
finitude, the partnership space for welfare tends to

disguise the perception of core needs. This line of
argument suggests that such aspects of identity would,
therefore, be avoided or denied within the legitimizing
spaces that are themselves emerging in reaction to the
passive/illness/disengagement roles traditionally
attributed to older people. The debate on incapacity
would seem to give some validation to Phillipson and

Biggs's (1998) 'no identity' hypothesis. With the rolling
back of welfare, the props to identity that in some way
underwrote late-life concerns, have also been

significantly weakened. The 'new' identities on offer, of
midlifestylism and partnership, either fail to address or
are based on a denial of actual dependence, and leave

little space in which these needs can be voiced. Policy on
abuse, increasingly associated with incapacity, defines a
space where victims can be legitimately observed if they

cannot find a place as active and participating. According
to this view, the hollowing out of the state is paralleled by
a hollowing out of the ageing identity.
IMPLICATIONS: SPACES IN WHICH TO GROW OLD?
It would seem from the above that health and welfare
services, a traditional point of reference for the later
stages of an ageing identity, have been subject to periods
of considerable flux, and that these processes are
throwing up new spaces in which identities can be
performed. It is argued that ageing has been split into two
separate spaces, one concerning partnership and another
concerning vulnerability. Both spaces exhibit

considerable ambivalence as to the likelihood that
genuine self-expression could be sustained within them.
Participation suggests the beginnings of negotiation

around shared definitions of caring space, but a wish for
uniformity in social inclusion might disguise real
differences in power to determine the shape of such

spaces. The doppelganger of partnership, as expressed in
the debate over capacity and surveillance, on the one
hand begins to define a space that allows legitimate

exclusion and on the other reverts to a very modern
notion of the removal of constraints (the abuse by others)
to increase personal freedom. It appears, however, that as
part and parcel of this latter development, ageing has

become the subject of intensified monitoring and control.
This is not to say that markers for self-expressive
social spaces are failing to emerge, although they are
often in vague and prefigurative forms. Leonard (1997)
has pointed out that contemporary health and social care
is both emancipatory and a means of social regulation. It
'objectifies and controls while at the same time it

represents a commitment to human caring' (Leonard
1997: 94, italics in original). Thus, a seat at the table of
partnership includes the possibility of a say in the process

of change, and freedom from abuse is a fundamental
starting block from which to engage in personal and
social agency as well as the negative implications noted in
the previous section.
Perhaps, in the light of this contradictory nature, it is
necessary to revisit the debate on midlifestyle and the

creation of age-specific communities. The core problem
with midlifestylism as a means to achieving a meaningful
mature identity is that it is based as much on denial as it
is on the recognition of the priorities of later life itself. It

has picked up the message that successful ageing depends
on maintenance, while ignoring the changed priorities
that also emerge. It has embraced a horizontal
multiplicity of surface identities without embracing
deeper layers of self-expression. Thus, retirement
communities, as material manifestations of extended
midlife, have tended to exhibit difficulty in dealing with
the increasing frailty that comes with advancing age,
resulting in an ejection of members who fail to maintain

strict criteria for physical and mental capacity (Latimer
1998). Researchers have noted a tendency to pervert the
protective space that such communities provide by

denigrating other, largely inner-city, communities, which
Kastenbaum (1993) has associated with a tacit racism,
and Laws (1995) with a sanctioning of similar attitudes to

younger generations and elders who wish to associate
with them.
This should not, however, eclipse the possibilities for
personal renewal held within other ways of using living

space as props to development of a mature identity. Peace
et al. (1997), for example, note three interrelated shifts in
such provision which have opened it up as an

intergenerational space, while increasing the power to
grow old with autonomy and security. They include
within this list a move towards the explicit recognition

that there are multiple stakeholders, that dependency is
socially constructed and that institutional climate can
play a significant role in both increasing or reducing it,
and recognition of the positive value of shared decision-
taking at a local level between workers and residents.

Typical of such developments would be Extra Care's
experiments with age-based communities in the UK's
West Midlands (Biggs et al. 1998). Here members have

often lived in the surrounding working-class area for
much of their lives, and see movement into the retirement
community as a new tenancy rather than primarily a

move into supportive care. In the Netherlands, Baars and
Thomese (1994) have noted the rapid growth of
communes as positive alternatives to traditional ideas on

ageing. The authors report that 'Communes provide for
members an opportunity to share and give meaning to a
phase of life that presently offers many unexplored
possibilities' (Baars and Thomese 1994: 348). These

communes are small in scale, consisting on average of
between 10 and 20 members, while the age of the
membership varies between 50 and 85 years old. Unlike
retirement communities, these spaces often include
people from different socio-economic groups. Peeters and
Woldringh (1988) have suggested that communes occupy
a position midway between functional networks, such as
occur in clubs and institutions, and informal
relationships, such as exist in friendships and families.

Considerable time appears to be spent in a continued
negotiation of intimacy, involvement with the collective
and boundaries with surrounding communities.
These new developments seem to offer a compromise
between 'ageing in place' as described by Callahan and
Lansbery (1997) and Minkler (1996) and closed, age-

homogeneous environments. Ageing in place refers to
areas or local communities with a naturally occurring
ageing membership, such as a particular district or
housing complex, an advantage of which is that residents

remain connected to wider social interaction. A recent
research interest in the value of friendship (Phillipson
1997; Pahl and Spencer 1998) rather than locality as a

basis for community life would support the value of
communal 'communities of interest' as a basis for late-life
development. These associations, like the activities of the

communards described above, would seem to promise
the possibility of both social connection and a space for
reflective ageing. At best these developments are being
shaped by older adults themselves and constitute an
attempt to tolerate the ambiguity between the mature

imagination and newly emerging social spaces. They are
perhaps prefigurative of environments that do not lose
themselves in the closed logic of midlifestylism and form

a bridge between personal continuity and social
engagement.
9
Conclusions and implications
REVISITING MIDLIFE AND BEYOND
Readers who have continued this far have now
reached a way station in their journey through ideas and
their possible consequences for mature ageing. Along the

way a number of features have been observed. First, there
has been a movement away from specified age-stages

towards metaphors of transition, to such an extent that
midlifestyles appear as fixed states, consisting of
continual transitions of one sort or another. This differs

from a view that transitions are points of difficulty
between otherwise unproblematic life-stages. Rather, the
maintenance of a believable identity has become a matter
of ongoing negotiation. Both of these understandings, the
modernist and the postmodern, tend to de-emphasize

problematic aspects of the ageing process itself and its
influence on the layering of the psyche. Second, it has
become clear that the structuring of mature imagination
varies markedly over personal and historical time, which
can lead to conflicts associated with age being
characterized differently. In some cases the question has
been posed in terms of increased social potential versus
restricted social possibilities. In others, personal and

social possibilities appear to have increased, but include a
denial of limitation and finitude. Third, the recognition of
multiple possibilities for selfpresentation may often be at

odds with more fundamental questions of ageing. It has
contributed to a particular layering of self-experience and

an emphasis on both depth and surface elements, the
boundary between them being negotiated through
masquerade. Age has, in other words, led to the
reinvention of distinctions between hidden and apparent

identities. Finally, the question still remains: of what a
genuine experience of mature identity is like. It is not a

reworking of a previous phase of life; neither is it an
invention, uprooted from personal and historical
experience. Insofar as there is an answer, it may lie in
spaces that facilitate a negotiated coming together of

personal and intersubjective truths.
A MODEL FOR THE MATURE IMAGINATION
It follows from the argument above that a space in
which genuine ageing identities can emerge should

contain certain recognizable qualities. It should, first and
foremost, allow harmony between deeper, personal,

layers of the psyche and intersubjectively agreed, social,
possibilities of self-expression. This is what is meant by
the merger of inner and external logics, the ability to
think reflectively as well as reflexively and an attention to

continuity of identity as well as its immediate cohesion.
Second, it should recognize the function of masque as
both a protective and a connective performance of mature

identity and allow for an element of playfulness in this
expression of self. While recognizing a new flexibility of

identity that has emerged under post-Fordist, post-
Eriksonian and post-stateist conditions, recognition is

also needed of hidden desires in later life, which may
require the performance of masquerade in order to test

out new spaces that emerge. Third, these spaces must
combine the facilitative qualities outlined above with an
ability to sustain a containing environment. In other
words, the space itself should have protective qualities
that render it safe for experiments in new ways of living.
In each case, a balance has to be achieved between the
need for personal expression and the social and physical

boundaries arising as part of the ageing process.
The model in Figure 9.1 describes, albeit in a

simplified form, the key characteristics that may need to
be considered in apprehending the mature imagination.
Each element of the figure is fluid and reciprocal, such
that a change to one would occasion changes to the other

parts.
Figure 9.1 A model for the mature imagination.
First, the opportunities for adopting different social
roles and identity statements are represented by a

horizontal line. This line corresponds to the surfaces
presented by a postmodern understanding of identity and
represents the multiplicity which is such an inviting
aspect of these ideas. It adds breadth to social possibility.
The elements of identity that appear along this line
would, of course, be graded in terms of status and power

relations; however, this is not the determining element of
his or her positioning within the model. They appear as
the possibilities open to any one person at any one time

and correspond to that person's apprehension of the
external logic of his or her immediate circumstances.
These options are described along a horizontal

continuum because that is how they appear to the psyche.
They are not, in other words, an issue of depth. The
continuum itself may include a variety of attributes, such

as complexity and accessibility, which the person
perceives to be salient and which influence his or her
identity choice. They are the concrete manifestations of
the possibilities inherent within a particular social space.
Second, a vertical line, extending downwards from

the horizontal, represents the layering of the individual
psyche. At surface layers, identity is represented through
the medium of social masking and masquerade. These
take the form of postures and stratagems adopted in
order to negotiate a compromise between the social
possibilities existing within the horizontal horizon and
the fears and desires arising from the inner logic of the
psyche. A key contemporary socio-historical
manifestation of these layerings can be seen in the
midlifestyles described in Chapter 5. Within such

arrangements causality is fuzzy. It may not be possible to
discern whether a performance depends more upon inner
or outer logic. However, the adoption of masquerade may

be experienced as a distinguishing feature, protecting the
inner from the outer and marking a boundary between
them. As has been discussed in Chapters 3 and 4, the

permeability of the mask, its flexibility and the degree of
choice and awareness experienced by the wearer might
vary depending upon age and circumstance. Beyond
layers concerning the deployment of masquerade lie core

elements of the inner logic of the self. In mature
adulthood, these may include some of the issues
described in Chapter 6. In some respects the identity
behind the mask may be the product of a self-conscious
act of deception or protection. This may be the case for,
example, with mature sexuality in a hostile environment.
In others, apprehension of what has been hidden is more
nebulous: it drifts in and out of conscious awareness,
leaving a signature that is sometimes decipherable and

sometimes not. Anxiety and the apprehension of finitude
may form such a relationship. The active imagination
would work primarily within these psychological

parameters and engage in a dialogue between such
existential concerns and still deeper formations,
unconscious material and emanations of life force. At this

depth, perception is liminal, and can be as much an
awareness of connection as the perception of form and
identity. In lifecourse terms, vertical layerings would

concern continuity of identity, memory and the pursuit of
life themes. Horizontal coherence would be more of an
issue of cohesion: whether a particular identity statement
'held together’ in a convincing manner within a particular

social space.
The two continua described above concern the inner
and outer logics of identity formations. The degree to
which they come together, and in what combination,
largely depends upon the nature of the social space in
which they take place. A merger of these two logics, and
thereby the surfacing of deeper psychological concerns,
would influence the perception of how genuinely identity

can be expressed. Social space occurs in the model as a
circle surrounding the vertical and horizontal continua. A
key quality of social space from this perspective is the

degree to which it can contain reflexive and reflective
awareness, as described in Chapter 7. Social spaces may
be facilitative. They may, in other words, allow people to

situate their thoughts and feelings and increase the
possibilities for understanding the influence of internal
and external logics upon the self. They may also be

coercive, and lead to the suppression of thought, feeling
and activity that does not fit the parameters of that
particular space. If the space is hostile to the expression
of mature identity, it will then give rise to a more rigid

split between the apparent and the hidden and a more
extensive adoption of masquerade. Social spaces are
socio-historical constructs, and they contribute to the
particular form that vertical layering takes and the
possibilities inherent in a horizontal continuum. In this
sense, the discussions of age and identity contained in
Chapters 1 and 2 (psychoanalysis, ego and analytic
psychology), and Chapters 7 and 8 (social policy) describe
particular spaces in which the mature imagination has

been shaped.
It is intended that the model described above be

heuristic rather than any form of definitive statement. It
simply describes one way of understanding identity
which highlights the relationship between the personal
and the social. It is one way, and may not necessarily be

the best way, of coming to an understanding of mature
adulthood. It does, however, constitute an attempt to
bring together surface, depth and social circumstance
without the opacity of proclaiming the primacy of one

over another.
AGE AND THE STUDY OF IDENTITY
The approach to adult identity described throughout
this book does lead to some, at first glance, rather
peculiar implications for the theory and practice of

working with age, both as a personal and as a
professional project. Most of these involve the tacit age-
grading that is so often a part of social institutions.
First, attention must be paid to the relative ability of

spaces to contain genuine expressions of mature
imagination. There is a tension between the layering of
the psyche and the veracity of reports. If the space is not
facilitative then all an observer, quality assessor or

researcher perceives will be the contours of a
masquerade. It follows that he or she will gain access to
only superficial layers of meaning, leaving enduring

desires and concerns untouched. This leads to a
consideration of the nature of fadlitative space, which, at
least theoretically, has been described as one in which

inner and outer logics merge. More work needs to be
done, however, on an operational definition of such

phenomena.
Second, social spaces are age-sensitized spaces. They

contain certain assumptions about not only the relative
value of priorities arising at different points in the

lifecourse, but also the likelihood that these differences
will be expressed. This observation suggests a need for

special attention to be paid to age as an element in who
speaks, makes decisions for whom and with what
priorities in mind. If there are radically different logics at
work at different phases of the adult lifecourse, then the
apprehension of the priorities of another age-group

becomes problematic. If legitimacy and power are age-
stratified, it becomes important to know who in an agency
decides and how far age is a factor in understanding the

requirements of other groups. The age structuration of
organizations, communities and other groupings now
becomes an issue.
Third, awareness of the balance achieved between
masquerade and deeper self-expression varies depending
on age and sodal space. At certain phases of the adult
lifecourse, where a comfortable mask has become

relatively fixed, the wearer may not distinguish between
masquerade and self. This may be the case even if identity
is performed within a fadlitative and containing space. By

contrast, finding oneself in a constraining space may lead
to continual tension between an emerging mature
imagination and social expectation. This tension may be
interpreted as resistance, pathology or sheer bloody-
mindedness, the labelling of which would imply radically
different courses of action for the self and for others. An
appreciation of these contingendes would mean that,
rather than being seen simply as a form of inauthenticity,

masque should be valued as an adaptive response to
inhospitable settings.
Fourth, the book is still open on the question of

whether the lifecourse has its own logic. Most of the
theoretical positions discussed here assume a certain
series of priorities of mature identity that cannot be fully

explained by recourse to social construction. For example,
the ageing of the body continues regardless of lifestyle,
and is fulcral to postmodern interpretations of mature
adulthood; the active imagination achieves salience with

advancing years and provokes a conflict with earlier life
priorities; generativity is perceived as in many respects a
natural reproductive aspect of human development. If it is

the case that elements of ageing have a logic of their own,
this deserves a certain respect, and questions therapeutic
objectives aimed at the reinvention of identity based
upon the immediate priorities of the here and now. It is
instructive, in this context, to observe the frequency with
which identity is described as a personal myth within the
literature of narrative therapy. Myth implies a creation of
fantasy, with little if any grounding in historical events.

Perhaps we should begin to think a little more in terms of
legends, which, when associations of grandiosity are
cleared away, refer to the interpretation of memory and

historical record. They are thereby anchored in some
form of external reality.
Fifth, the unpeeling of experience from age

structuration and measurement suggests that age
subjectivity, cohort and chronology should be clearly
distinguished both conceptually and empirically. It
destabilizes the easy assumption that mature imagination

can be deduced simply by working backwards from fixed
categories. They contribute to the delineation of social
space, but provoke a variety of associations and reactions

at the personal level. Indeed, where conduct is
determined by the uniformities of cohort and chronology,
it is almost certain that a space has emerged in which the
diversity that accompanies adult ageing has been subject
to suppression.
Finally, attention to the diverse possibilities that
emerge as maturity takes shape provokes its own form of

reflexivity. While the role of theory and theorists has
traditionally been to interpret ageing, perhaps it is also

true that the interpretations they make are age-
dependent. Should attention move, for example, from
postmodern theories of ageing to ageing and the
popularity of postmodern theory. Perhaps we should

begin to think of the age of theorizing as well as the
theorizing of age, as a preoccupation with reinvention, for
example, reflecting the priorities of midlife Peter and

Petra Pans, albeit at a particular historical juncture.
QUESTIONS FOR RESEARCH
Preliminary conclusions concerning the formulation
of mature identity indicate that, in future, greater

research emphasis may need to be placed on the
following:
1. A recognition of the negotiated and performative

nature of identities and the effects of legitimizing
spaces created by policy initiatives and wider social
trends. That is, greater understanding is needed of the
conditions under which certain sorts of performance
take place, along with examination of the personal
strategies adopted by participants and their effects on
the successful negotiation of helping situations.
2. It now appears that human services concerned with
later-life are dealing with at least two identity
dimensions: negotiations across the professional and
everyday divide and those between generations, the
effects of which can be expected to be cumulative and
mutative. The relationships between age and position
in the system have not been fully examined to date and
suggest research questions around the construction of
problem areas.
3. Work on identity management and social relationships
is becoming more fluid for both older people and
helping professionals, and includes trends towards
interdisciplinarity, partnership and stakeholding.
Conceptions of identity in later life are themselves
becoming more diverse, such that older people are
likely to make different demands on service systems
from those traditionally made. The effects on service
demand and legitimacy require further investigation.
4. A study of the relationship between the intended and
unintended implications of particular initiatives by an
examination of their tacit as well as explicit logics.
Confusions might arise, for example, between
participation and responding to health and welfare
need, such that participation is in itself perceived as
fulfilling mature adults' requirements. It is also unclear
what happens to those who do not or cannot articulate
their desires within this system.
5. The emergence of multiple options and layers of

identity raises the question of multiple perspective.
How far do such perspectives overlap? How are gaps
recognized, negotiated or legitimized? We may be
moving away from problems associated with
uniformity of delivery towards problems of diversity
and uncertainty. These trends suggest an assessment
of the degree of overlap of perception between groups
and factors that contribute to effective co-working,
plus an examination of gaps that emerge in policy and
practice and contribute to the emergence of 'risky'
spaces or 'no identity zones'.
6. There would also appear to be a need to develop
research tools that can identify the phenomena
highlighted by the current perspective. These include a
means of operationalizing the relationship between
policy and the creation of legitimizing spaces for
professional-user interaction, the distinction between
masquerade and more fundamental expressions of
self, including the interaction between surface options
and layering of identity, and the relationship between
inner and outer logics.
QUESTIONS FOR PSYCHOTHERAPY
Perhaps the most obvious, yet telling, conclusion to

emphasize for the talking therapies is that age is not a
barrier to work with mature adults. Rather, age has
become a significant factor, not only in the question of
access to counselling and psychotherapy, but also as an

influence on the quality of relationship that develop
between client and therapist and the different levels at
which such work might take place.
The implications for practice are therefore
considerable. First, it is important to recognize the role of
psychotherapy itself as a space which shapes social and

personal possibility. In particular, it is necessary to
become sensitized to the pervasive influence on child-
centred theorising. This not only privileges early

experience, it also casts the older adult as the villain of the
piece. According to this view, your parents screw you up,
whether they wish to or not. In intergenerational terms,

this leaves the older client with a considerable barrier to
overcome when faced with the younger therapist. If the
therapeutic encounter is to become a space in which the

inner world is respected, allowed free expression and
protection from social prejudice, these theoretical biases

must be recognized and their impact countered. Second, it
has become clear that the mature imagination is itself
multifaceted and that within the inner world of the older
adult a number of age-specific identities may coexist. This
point has a number of implications, most notably for the

variety of possibilities for transference and
countertransference phenomena that a therapist and

client might encounter when working together. Adult age,
in other words, is an important source of structuration for
the human psyche. Third, the possibility of difference
between the existential priorities of younger and later
adulthood should be recognized as an important factor
patterning the progress of therapy, the conflicts that arise

and the acceptability of potential resolution. This
difference introduces a fourth factor, concerning the
impact of ageist environments on personal growth and

development. This impact is double edged. On the one
hand prejudice against mature imagination may have lead
to the performance of a deeply embedded masquerade,

employed to protect the self from external attack. On the
other, rather than forcing personal identity into a fixed
position, the diversity of identity promised under

postmodern conditions may leave no place for the
consideration of core existential questions that arise in
midlife and beyond. The mature psyche, as it appears in
therapeutic encounters, may thus be multilayered,

multifaceted and confronted by dizzying yet insubstantial
variety. Under such conditions, critical attention might
need to be given to the relationship between the
invention of personal narratives and the maintenance of
continuity of identity.
QUESTIONS FOR HEALTH AND SOCIAL CARE
A significant conclusion of the current argument is
that the 'modern' vision of the lifecourse, dominant in the

1950s and 1960s and influential in the shaping of
contemporary health and welfare policy, has come under

increasing strain as social change and technical advance
have gathered pace. Three factors have contributed to
this rethinking of mature identity, which will effect
expectations of psychological and physical well-being.

These factors include an erosion of rigid divisions
between age-groups, experiment with a variety of
lifestyles by older adults themselves and therapeutic and

technological advances that increase bodily potential.
Lifestyle choices contain a mixture of enhanced potential

and avoidance of fundamental ageing processes, and
present challenges some of which are familiar and some

quite new. These challenges include: a concentration of
age-specific populations with associated health and social

needs, which in some cases exhibit an absence of
intergenerational supports; the adoption of healthy
lifestyles combined with the sanction of exclusion in cases
of 'health failure'; and a demand for services that
maintain participation and positive self-perception.
Thus, while these 'alternative' lifestyles may promote
a healthy and participative old age, they may also be

prone to individual cases of catastrophic collapse. This
collapse is intensified by an absence of, and in some cases

hostility to, intergenerational support and a climate of
denial concerning legitimate dependency and age-related
decrements. Where health and social needs are identified
by this population they are likely to be geared towards

bodily and social maintenance rather than palliative care.
In many ways, lifestyle communities reproduce some of
the classic aspects of institutionalization: concentrations

of need, often unaddressed, but this time expressed by a
vociferous and increasingly sophisticated population.
They are reflected in the growth of retirement
communities, seasonal migration among people for whom

one residence is a second homeland and a seemingly
insatiable appetite for localities previously associated
with leisure, such as the seaside in British late-life. Service
demand reflects a ghettoization of high-demand groups

and a possible transfer of services away from chronicity
and towards the problems of vocal and resource-rich
elements of the ageing population.
Demands for health interventions based on lifestyle

are in a reciprocal relationship with advances in medical
technology. Together they mark a fundamental shift in

perceptions of the ageing body, which is now seen as both
a barrier to lifestyle choice and more malleable. Advances
in cosmetic surgery, genetics and pharmacology, and a
growing and sophisticated range of prosthetic options,

have led to a decoupling of bodily, chronological and
social-psychological ageing. These developments have
contributed, in the popular imagination, to the possibility

of reshaping the body and revising the ageing process. It
is reflected in the growth of best-selling manuals that
encourage the reader to maintain a midlifestyle, or
abolish ageing altogether. The ageing body, in other

words, need no longer be a barrier to self-enhancement.
This is not simply a matter of medical progress.
Something very different is happening to our cultural
understanding of ageing. Ageing, in the minds of many

patients, is becoming an option, even though this may
simply reflect a heady mixture of public faith in medical
science and an unwillingness to adapt consumer lifestyles
to new circumstances.
The cultural momentum engendered by this changing
relationship to the body is, arguably, familiar to helping

professionals who are subject to patients' perplexity and
dismay if a convincing remedy cannot be supplied for a
particular complaint. There may even have been a move
towards 'recreational surgery' (Hodgekin 1996); in other

words, interventions that enhance beyond normative
standards of performance and repair. Concepts of
normality have a history of misuse, in the service of a

prejudicial denial of services to older adults. However,
trends identified above might also predict greater
sensitivity to distinctions based on the ethics of medical
interventions to enhance performance. This debate

approximates that surrounding the recreational use of
steroids and is suggestive of demands over and above the
palliative and cure, to enhancement beyond what the
body and mind are ordinarily capable of. In terms of

health and social care, we would no longer be guided by
late-life as 'downhill all the way', but be entering new
territory in terms of how older people might be living,
and their expectations. The shaping of mature identity in

ways that largely avoid or deny questions of ageing would
indicate the need for counselling and educational services
that can offer lifecourse advice. Issues, for example, the

deployment of masquerade and existential questions that
are often left unaddressed might then be subject to
negotiation. This service would extend to the mediation of

intergenerational relationships, especially where these
have become troubled.
Trends in demography, lifestyle and health

technology, then, may significantly influence future
demand for health-related services in later life.
Specifically, trends point to a growth in demand for
therapies of bodily maintenance and enhancement, in

addition to the more traditional care of chronic
conditions. The populations generating these demands
may differ depending on geography and socio-economic
status, with vocal and affluent concentrations contrasted

with patients who are both socially marginalized and
geographically dispersed. Groups generating novel
demands would have many positive attributes in terms of
healthy lifestyle and have, by degrees, bought the

message of health promotion. However, rather than
reducing service requirements, lifestyle changes may
have simply changed the nature of demands being made.

These trends pose significant challenges to the
contemporary orthodoxies of health and social care,
which include re-examining notions of normality in late-

life development, the impact of lifestyle change on
demand for services and the strategic impact of

concentrated age-specific groupings. Developments are
complicated by a widespread denial of existential
questions and performative aspects of identity during the
mature lifecourse. A fuller understanding of the fears and
desires that drive contemporary patterns requires a more

sophisticated apprehension of the mature imagination, to
which this book is a contribution.
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The Mature Imagination Simon Biggs

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The Mature Imagination

Dynamics of identity in midlife and beyond

e-Book 2018 International Psychotherapy Institute

All Rights Reserved

This e-book contains material protected under

Created in the United States of America

1 Maturity and its discontents

2 From ego psychology to the active imagination

4 Masque and ageing

6 Meaning and forgetting

7 Social spaces and mature identity

8 Policy spaces in health and welfare

9 Conclusions and implications

Hepworth for their comments on this manuscript and

related material, Michael Allen for ideas and conversation,

material. Thanks also go to Clare Allen and Guy and Eve

Biggs for their support and forbearance.

WHAT IS THE MATURE IMAGINATION?

To encounter the mature imagination raises issues

that are key to both personal and social understanding.

How far, for example, is it possible to discover an

influences that shape our understandings of age and

identity? What are the possibilities for change, and how

desirable is it perceived to be? In the attempt to answer

assumptions of our times. Contemporary Western

both our conception of the human condition and our

Chief among them are the psychotherapies and the

adoption of lifestyles which are intended to determine the

with varying degrees of success, techniques for the

But what is meant by mature imagination? The

phrase has been adopted in part because there is

development in maturity that are positive and offer the

prospect of critical analysis. It constitutes a way of

themselves to have reached a level of sustained

experience and a certain competence in negotiating

described as ranging through midlife and then on into

lifecourse under contemporary conditions. When one is

without maps to guide us. The confusion experienced

Midway upon the journey of our life,

I found myself within a dark forest,

When Dante wrote this first stanza of the Divine

Comedy, in 1307, he was 35, the middle-point of the

biblical lifecourse, which, it was assumed, spanned three

signposts that had allowed him to negotiate the first half

basis of previous experience, no way out of the wood,

except of course, downward. It seemed from the

Questions about the development of a mature identity

—that is to say, an identity that will be serviceable and

Western societies are in the grip of continued

demographic change, but also because a consideration of

mature ageing now has a special practical and theoretical

policy-makers, professional helpers and the person in the

eclipsed by a cultural preoccupation with novelty,

as well as our formal theories of life, which we often take

challenged by ageing. Ageing forces the perception of

different paths out of the forest.

A paradox emerges when the words mature and

imagination are brought together, which goes to the heart

of the issue of identity in adulthood proper. Maturity is

of the life phase and according to the Oxford English

'complete, perfect or ready'. Dictionaries are good guides

raises a series of different issues. Imagination invites the

a imbued with a sense of becoming, of travelling beyond

the immediate and the concrete. One imagines other